1) 






a 













:unf?!rvir 









LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



f^^ 






^^^:^?'^rs's»r^^^^:<^-^^, 



Sinners and Saints. 



A TOUR ACROSS THE STATES, AND 
ROUND THEM; 



THREE MONTHS AMONG THE MORMONS. 



BY 

PHIL ROBINSON, 

AUTHOR OF "under THE SUN. 




BOSTON: 

ROBERTS BROTHERS. 

1883. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

FROM NEW YORK TO CHICAGO. 

PACK 

By the Pennsylvania Limited — Her Majesty's swine — Glimpses 
of Africa and India — "Eligible sites for Kingdoms"— The 
Phoenix city — Street scenes — From pig to pork — The 
Sparrow line — Chicago Mountain — Melancholy merry- 
makers I 



CHAPTER II. 

FROM CHICAGO TO DENVER. 

leathers of Waters— " Rich Lands lie Flat "—The Misery River- 
Council Bluffs — A " Live " town, sir — Two murders : a con- 
trast — Omaha — The immorality of " writing up " — On the 
prairies — The modesty of " Wish-fon-Wish " — The antelope's 
tower of refuge — Out of Nebraska into Colorado — Man-eating 
Tiger 19 



CHAPTER HI. 

IN LEADVILLE. 

The South Park line — Oscar Wilde on sunflowers as food — In a 
wash-hand basin — Anti- Vigilance Committees — Leadville the 
city of the carbonates — ** Busted " millionaires — The philo- 



AV 



iv Contents, 



PACK 

sophy of thicK boots — Colorado miners — National competition 
in lions — Abuse of the terms "gentleman " and "lady " — Up 
at the mines — Under the pine-trees 36 



CHAPTER IV. 

FROM LKADVTLLE TO SALT LAKE CITY. 

What is the conductor of a Pullman car?— Cannibalism fatal to 
lasting friendships — Starving Peter to feed Paul— Connexion 
between Irish cookery and Parnellism — Americans not 
smokers — In Denver — "The Queen City of the Plains" — 
Over the Rockies — Pride in a cow, and what came of it — 
Sage-brush — Would ostriches pay in the West? — Echo Canon 
— The Mormons' fortifications— Great Salt Lake in sight . 52 



CHAPTER V. 

• THE CITY OF THE HONEY-BEE. 

Zion — Deseret — A City of Two Peoples — " Work " the watch- 
word of Mormonism — A few facts to the credit of the Saints 
— The text of the Edmunds Bill — In the Mormon Tabernacle 
— The closing scene of the Conference 68 



CHAPTER VI. 

LEGISLATION AGAINST PLURALITY. 

People under a ban — What the Mormon men think of the Anti- 
Polygamy Bill — And what the Mormon women say of poly- 
gamy—Puzzling confidences — Practical plurality a very dull 
affair — But theoretically a hedge-hog problem — Matrimonial 
eccentricities — The fashionable milliner fatal to plurality — • 
Absurdity of comparing Moslem polygamy with Mormon plu- 
raLty — Are the women of Utah happy ? — Their enthusiasm 
for Women's Rights . 82 



Contents, 



CHAPTER VII. 

SUA SI BONA NORINT. 

PAGB 

A Special CoiTespondent's lot — Hypothecated v/its — The Daugh- 
ters of Zion — Their modest demeanour — Under the banner of 
Woman's Rights — The discoverer discovered — Turning the 
tables — " By Jove, sir, you shall have mustard with your 
beefsteak ! " loi 



CHAPTER VIIL 

COULD THE MORMONS FIGHT? 

An unfulfilled prophecy — Had Brigham Young been still alive ? — 
The hierarchy of Mormonism — The fighting Apostle and his 
colleagues — Plurality a revelation — Rajpoot infanticide : how 
it was stamped out — Would the Mormons submit to the pro- 
cess ? — Their fighting capabilities — Boer and Mormon : an 
analogy between the Dralcensberg and the Wasatch ranges — 
The Puritan fanaticism of the Saints — Awaiting^ the fulness of 
time and of prophecy IIO 

CHAPTER IX. 

■THE SAINTS AND THE RED MEN. 

Prevalent errors as to the red man — Secret treaties — The policy of 
the Mormons towards Indians — A Christian heathen — Fight- 
ing-strength of Indians friendly to Mormons . . . .124 



CHAPTER X. 

REPRESENTATIVE AND UNREPRESENTATIVE MORMONISM. 

Mormonism and Mormonism — Salt Lake City not representative — 
The miracles of water — How settlements grow — The town of 
Logan : one of the Wonders of the West— The beauty of the 
valley — The rural simplicity of life — Absence of liquor and 
crime — A police force of one man — Temple mysteries — Illus- 
trations of Mormon degradation — Their settlement of the 
*' local option " question 130 



vi Contents. 



CHAPTER XI. 

THROUGH THE MORMON SETTLEMENTS 

PAGE 

Salt Lake City to Nephi — General similarity of the settlements — 
From. Salt Lake Valley into Utah Valley — A lake of legends 
— Provo — Into the Juab valley— Indian reminiscences — Com- 
mercial integrity of the saints — At Nephi — Good work done 
by the saints — Type of face in rural Utah — Mormon " doc- 
trine " and Mormon " meetings." ..... 144 



CHAPTER XII. 

FROM NEPHI TO MANTI. 

English companies and their failures — A deplorable neglect of 
claret cup — Into the San Pete Valley — Reminiscences of the 
Indians — The forbearance of the red man — The great temple 
at Manti — Masonry and Mormon mysteries — In a tithing- 
house 160 



CHAPTER XIIL 

FROM MANTI TO GI.ENWOOD. 

Scandinavian Mormons — Danish ol — Among the orchards at Manti 
— On the way to Conference — Adam and Eve — The proto- 
plasm of a settlement — Ham and eggs — At Mayfield— Our 
teamster's theory of the ground-hog — On the way to Glenwood 
— Volcanic phenomena and lizards — A suggestion for im- 
proving upon Nature — Primitive Art 167 



CHAPTER XIV. 

FROM GLENWOOD TO MONROE. 

From Glenwood to Salina— Deceptiveness of appearances— An 
apostate Mormon's friendly testimony — Reminiscences of the 
Prophet Joseph Smith— Rabbit-hunting in a waggon — Lost 
in the sage-brush — A day at Monroe — Girls riding pillion — 



Contents. vii 



PAGE 



The Sunday drum— Waiting for the right man : *' And what 
if he w married?" — The truth about apostasy: not always 
voluntary 178 



CHAPTER XV. ^ 

AT MONROE. 



" Schooling " in the Mormon districts — Innocence as to whisky, 
but connoisseurs in water — "What do you think of that 
water, sir ? " — Gentile dependents on Mormon charity — The 
one-eyed rooster — Notice to All ! 188 



CHAPTER XVI. 

JACOB HAMBLIN. 

A Mormon missionary among the Indians— The story of Jacob 
Hamblin's life — His spiritualism, the result of an intense faith 
— His good work among the Lamanites — His belief in his own 
miracles ... 196 



CHAPTER XVII. 

THROUGH MARYSVALE TO KINGSTON. 

Piute County — Days of small things — A swop in the sage-brush ; 
two Bishops for one Apostle — The Kings of Kingston — A 
failure in Family . 206 

CHAPTER XVIII. 

FROM KINGSTON TO ORDERVILLE. 

On the way to Panguitch — Section-houses not Mormon homes — 

Through wild country —Panguitch and its fish — Forbidden 

pleasures — At the source of the Rio Virgin— The surpassing 

. beauty of Long Valley — The Orderville Brethren — A success 

in Family Communism 2l6 



viii Contents, 



CHAPTER XIX. 

MORMON VIRTUES. 

PAGB 

Red ants and anti-Mormons — Ignorance of the Mormons among 
Gentiles in Salt Lake City— Mormon reverence for the Bible 
— Their struggle against drinking-saloons in the city — Con- 
spicuous piety in the settlements — Their charity — Their so- 
briety (to my great inconvenience) —The literature of Mor- 
monism utterly unreliable— Neglect of the press by the Saints 
— Explanation of the wide- spread misrepresentation of Mor- 
monism . ' . 235 

CHAPTER XX. 
DOWN THE ONTARIO MINE 248 

CPIAPTER XXI. 

FROM UTAH INTO NEVADA. 

Rich and ugly Nevada — Leaving Utah— The gift of the Alfalfa — 
Through a lovely country to Ogden — The great food-devouring 
trick — From Mormon to Gentile : a sudden contrast — The 
son of a cinder — Is the red man of no use at all? — The 
papoose's papoose —Children all of one family . . . 259 

CHAPTER XXIL 

FROM NEVADA INTO CALIFORNIA. 

Of bugbears — Suggestions as to sleeping-cars — A Bannack chief, 
his hat and his retinue — The oasis of Humboldt — Past Carson 
Sink — A reminiscence of wolves — "Hard places" — First 
glimpses of California — A corn miracle — Bunch-grass and 
Bison — From Sacramento to Benicia 276 

CHAPTER XXIIL 

San Franciscans, their fruits and their falsehoods — Their neglect 
of opportunities — A plague of flies — The pigtail problem — 



Co7ttents. Ix 



PAGE 

Chinamen less black than they are painted — The seal rocks — 
Thelossof the ^^^/jc/zVv— A jeweller's fairyland — The mystery 
of gems 288 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

Gigantic America — Of the treatment of strangers — The wild-life 
world — Railway Companies' food-frauds — California Felix — • 
Prairie-dog history — The exasperation of wealth — Blessed 
with good oil — The meek lettuce and judicious onion — Salads 
and Salads — The perils of promiscuous grazing . . . 303 



CHAPTER XXV. 

The Carlyle of vegetables — The moral in blight — Bee-farms — The 
city of Angels — Of squashes — Curious vegetation — The incom- 
patibility of camels and Americans — Are rabbits "seals"? — ■ 
All wilderness and no weather — An " infinite torment of flies " 317 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

THROUGH THE COWBOYS' COUNTRY. 

The Santa Cruz valley — The cactus — An ancient and honourable 
pueblo — A terrible beverage — Are cicadas deaf? — A floral 
catastrophe — The secretary and the peccaries . . . 328 

CHAPTER XXVII. 

American neglect of natural history — Prairie-dogs again ; their 
courtesy and colouring — Their indifference to science — A hard 
crowd — Chuckers out — Makeshift Colorado . . . .341 

CHAPTER XXVIII. 

Nature's holiday — Through wonderful country — Brown negroes 
a libel on mankind — The Wild-flower State— The black 



Contents, 



problem — A piebald flirt — The hippopotamus and the flea — 
A narrow escape — The home of the swamp-goblin — Is the 
moon a fraud ? . 348 



CHAPTER XXIX 

Frogs, in the swamp and as a side-dish^Negroids of the s\\amp 
age — Something like a mouth — Honour in your own country 
— The Land of Promise — Civilization again .... 363 



SINNERS AND SAINTS. 



CHAPTER I. 

FROM NEW YORK TO CHICAGO. 

By the Pennsylvania Limited — Her Majesty's swine — Glimpses of 
Africa and India— " Eligible sites for Kingdoms"— The Phoenix 
city — Street scenes — From pig to pork — The Sparrow line — 
Chicago Mountain— Melancholy meny-makers. 

" Does the fast train to Chicago ever stop .?" was the ques- 
tion of a bewildered English fellow-passenger, Westward- 
bound like myself, as I took my seat in the car of the 
Pennsylvania Limited mail that was to carry me nearly 
half the distance from the Atlantic to the Pacific. " Oh, 
yes," I replied, " it stops— a:^ Chicago'' 

By this he recognized in me a fellow-innocent, and so we 
foregathered at once, breakfasted together, and then went 
out to smoke the calumet tosfether. 



To an insular traveller, it is a prodigiously long journey 
this, across the continent of America, but I found the 
journey a perpetual enjoyment. Even the dull country 
of the first hour's travelling had many points of interest for 
the stranger — scattered hamlets of wooden houses that were 
only joined together by straggling strings of cocks and hens; 
the others that seemed to have been trying to scramble over 
the hill and down the other side but were caught just as 

B 



Sinners and Saints. 



they got to the top and pinned down to the ground with 
lightning conductors ; the others that had palings round 
them to keep them from running away, but had got on to 
piles as if they were stilts and intended (when no one was 
looking) to skip over the palings and go away ; the others 
that had rows of dwarf fir-trees in front of them, through 
which they stared out of both their windows like a forward 
child affecting to be shy behind its fingers. These fir-trees 
are themselves very curious, for they give the country a half- 
cultivated appearance, and in some places make the hillsides 
and valleys look like immense cemeteries, and only waiting 
for the tombstones. Even the levels of flooded land and the 
scorched forests were of interest, as significant of a country 
still busy over its rudiments 

'• All charcoal and puddles," said a fellow-traveller dis- 
paragingly ; " I'm very glad we're going so fast through it." 

Now for my own part I think it looks very uncivil of a train 
to go with a screech through a station without stopping, and 
I always wish I could say something in the way of an apology 
to the station-master for the train's bad manners. No doubt 
people who live in very small places get accustomed to 
trains rushing past their platforms without stopping even to 
say " By your leave." But at first it must be rather painful. 
At least I should think it was. On the other hand, the people 
" in the mofussil " (which is the Anglo-Indian for " all the 
country outside one's own town ") did not pay much attention 
to our train. Everybody went about their several works 
for all the world as if we were not flashing by. Even the 
dogs trotted about indifferently, without even so much as 
noticing us, except occasionally some distant mongrel, who 
barked at the train as if it was a stray bullock, and smiled 
complacently upon the adjoining landscape when he found 
how thoroughly he had frightened it away. 



By the Pennsylvania Limited. 



There seemed to me a curious dearth of small wild life. 
The English " country " is so full of birds that all others 
seem, by comparison, birdless. Once, I saw a russet- 
winged hawk hovering over a copse of water-oak as if it 
saw something worth eating there \ once, too, I saw a blue- 
bird brighten a clump of cedars. Now and again a vagabond 
crow drifted across the sky. But, as compared with Europe 
or parts of the East which I know best, bird-life was very 
scanty. 

And presently Philadelphia came sliding along to meet 
us with a stately decorum of metalled roads and well-kept 
public grounds, and we stopped for the first of the twelve 
halts, worth calling such, which I had to make in the 3000 
miles between the Atlantic and the Pacific. 

How treacherously the trains in America start ! There 
is no warning given, so far as an ordinary passenger can see, 
that the start is under contem.plation, and it takes him by 
surprise. The American understands that " All aboard " 
means " If you don't jump up at once you'll be left behind.'' 
But to those accustomed to a " first " and a " second " and 
a " third " bell — and accustomed, too, not to get up even 
then until the guard has begged them as a personal favour 
to take their seats — the sudden departure of the iVmerican 
locomotive presents itself as a rather shabby sort of practical 
joke. 

The quiet, unobtrusive scenery beyond Philadelphia is 
English in character, and would be still more so if there 
were hedges instead of railings. By the way, whenever 
reading biographical notices of distinguished Americans I 
have been surprised to find that so many of them at one 
time or other had " split rails " for a subsistence. But now 
that I have followed " the course of empire " West, I am 
not the least surprised. I only wonder that every American 

B 2 



4 Sinners and Saints, 

has not split rails, at one time or another, or, indeed, gone 
on doing it all his life. For how such a prodigious- quan- 
tity of rails ever got split (even supposing distinguished 
men to have assisted in the industry in early life) passes my 
feeble comprehension. All the way from New York to 
Chicago there are on an average twenty lines of split rails 
running parallel with the railway track, in sight all at once ! 
And after all, this is only one narrow strip across a gigantic 
continent. In fact, the two most prominent " natural fea- 
tures " of the landscape along this route are dwarf firs and 
split rails. But no writer on America has ever told me so. 
Nor have I ever been told of the curious misapprehension 
prevalent in the States as to the liberty of the subject 
in the British Isles. 

In America, judging at any rate from the speech of " the 
average American," I find that there is a belief prevalent 
that the English nation " lies prostrate under the heel of 
a tyrant." What a shock to those who think thus, must have 
been that recent episode of the queen's pigs at Slough ! 

Six swine and a calf belonging to her Majesty found 
themselves, the other day, impounded by the Slough magis- 
trates for coming to market without a licence. Slough, 
from geographical circumstances over which it has no con- 
trol, happens to be in Buckinghamshire, and this country 
has been declared " an infected district," so that the bailiff 
who brought his sovereign's pigs to market, without due 
authority to do so, transgressed the law. Two majesties 
thus came into collision over the calf, and that of the law 
prevailed. Such a constitutional triumph as this goes far 
to clear away the clouds that appeared to be gathered upon 
the political horizon, and the shadows, of a despotic dicta- 
torship which seemed to be falling across England begin to 
vanish. The written law, contained probably in a very 



Her Majesty's Swine, 5 

dilapidated old copy in the possession of these rural 
magistrates, a dogs'-eared and, it may be, even a ragged 
volume, asserted itself supreme over a monarch's farmyard 
stock, and dared to break down that divinity which dotli 
hedge a Sovereign's swine. There are some who say that in 
the British Isles men are losing their reverence for the law, 
and that justice wears two faces, one for the rich and an- 
other for the poor. They would have us believe that only 
the parasites of princes sit in high place, and that the scales 
of justice rise or fall according to the inclinations of the 
sceptre, with the obsequious regularity of the tides that wait 
upon the humours of the moon. But such an incident as 
this, when the Justices of Slough, those intrepid Hampdens, 
sate sternly in their places, and, fearless of Royal frowns and 
all the displeasure of Windsor, dispensed to the pigs, born 
in the purple, and to the calf that had lived so near a throne, 
the impartial retribution of a fine — with costs — gives a 
splendid refutation to these calumnies. Where shall we look 
in Republican history for such another incident ? or where 
search for dauntless magistrates like those of Slough, who 
shut their eyes against the reflected glitter of a Court, who 
fined the Royal calf for risking the health of Hodge's mise- 
rable herd, and gave the costs against the Imperial pigs for 
travelling into Buckinghamshire without a licence? Fiat 
justitia, ruat coelum. There was no truckling here to 
borrowed majesty, no sycophant adulation of Royal owner- 
ship ; but that fine old English spirit of courageous inde- 
pendence which has made tyrants impossible in our island 
and our law supreme. It was of no use before such men as 
these, the stout-hearted champions of equal justice, for the 
baiUff to plead manorial privilege, or to threaten the thunders 
of the House of Brunswick. They were as implacable as a 
bench of Rhadamanthuses, and gave these distinguished 



Sinners and Saints, 



hogs the grim choice between paying a pound or going to 
one. Nor, to their credit be it said, did either baihff, calf, 
or pigs exhibit resentment. On the contrary, they accepted 
judgment with that respectful acquiescence which charac- 
terizes our law-abiding race, and the swine turned without 
a murmur from the scene of their repulse, and trotted cheer- 
fully before the bailiff out of Buckinghamshire back to 
Windsor. 

The bailiff, no doubt, bethought him of the past, and 
wished the good old days of feudalism were back, when a 
King's pig was a better man than a Buckinghamshire 
magistrate. But if he did, he abstained from saying so. On 
the contrary, he paid his fine like a loyal subject, and gather- 
ing his innocent charges round him went forth, more in 
sorrow than in anger, from the presence of the magisterial 
champions of the public interests. The punished pigs, too, 
may have felt, perhaps, just a twinge of regret for the days 
when they roamed at will over the oak-grown shires, infecting 
each other as they chose, without any thought of Contagious 
Diseases Acts or vigilant justices. But they said nothing ; 
and the spectacle of an upright stipendiary dispensing im- 
partial justice to a law-abiding aristocracy was thus 
complete. 

To return to my car. Beyond Philadelphia the country 
was waking up for Spring. The fields were all flushed with 
the first bright promise of harvest ; blackbirds — reminding 
me of the Indian king-crows in their sliding manner of 
flight and the conspicuous way in which they use their tails 
as rudders — were flying about in sociable parties ; and 
flocks of finches went jerking up the hill-sides by fits and 
starts after the fashion of these frivolous little folk. 

A mica-schist (it may be gneiss) abounds along the rail- 
way track, and it occurred to me that I had never, except 



Glimpses of Africa and India. 



in India, seen this material used for the ornamentation of 
houses. Yet it is very beautiful. In the East they beat it 
up into a powder — some is white, some yellow — and after 
mixing it with weak lime and water, wash the walls with it, 
the result being a very effective although subdued sparkle, 
in some places silvery, in others golden. 

Nearing Harrisburg the country begins to resemble upper 
Natal very strongly, and when we reached the Susquehanna", 
I could easily have believed that we were on the Mooi, on 
the borders of Zululand. But the superior majesty of the 
American river soon asserted itself, and I forgot the com- 
parison altogether as I looked out on this truly noble stream, 
with the finely wooded hills leaning back from it on either 
side, as if to give its waters more spacious way. 

And then Harrisburg, and the same stealthy departure of 
the train. But outside the station our having started was 
evident enough, for a horse that had been left to look after 
a buggy for a few minutes, took fright, and with three frantic 
kangaroo-leaps tried to take the conveyance whole over a 
wall. But failing in this, it careered away down the road with 
the balance of the buggy dangling in a draggle-tail sort of 
way behind it. 

Nature works with so few ingredients that landscape re- 
peats itself in every continent. For there is a limit, after 
all, to the combinations possible of water, mountain, plain, 
valley, and vegetation. This is strictly true, of course, only 
when we deal with things generically. Specific combinations 
go beyond arithmetic. But even with her species. Nature 
delights in singing over old songs and telling the tales she 
has already told. For instance here, after passing Harris- 
burg, is a wonderful glimpse of Naini Tal in the Indian 
hills — memorable for a terribly fatal landslip three years 
ago — with its oaks and rhododendrons and scattered pines. 



Sinners and Saints, 



In the valleys the streams go tumbling along with willows 
on either bank, and here and there on the hillsides, shine 
white houses with orchards about them. 

The houses men build for themselves when they are 
thinking only of shelter are ugly enough. Elegance, like 
the nightingale, is a creature of summer-time, when the 
hard-working months of the year are over and Nature sits in 
her drawing-room, so to speak, playing the fine lady, paint- 
ing the roses and sweetening the peaches. But, ugly though 
they are, these scattered homesteads are by far the finest 
lines in all the great poem of this half-wild continent, and 
lend a grand significance to every passage in which they 
occur. And the pathos of it ! Look at those two horses 
and a man driving a plough through that scrap of ground 
yonder. There is not another living object in view, though 
the eye covers enough ground for a European principality. 
Yet that man dares to challenge all this tremendous Nature 1 
It is David before Goliath, before a whole wilderness of 
Goliaths, with a plough for a sling and a ploughshare for a 
pebble. 

Here all of a sudden is another man, all alone with some 
millions of trees and the Alleghanies. And he stands there 
with an axe in his hands, revolving in that untidy head of his 
what he shall do next to the old hills and their reverend 
forest growth. The audacity of it, and the solemnity ! 

It would be as well perhaps for sentiment if every man 
was quite alone. For I find that if there are two men to- 
gether one immediately tries to sell the other something ; 
and to inform him of its nature, he goes and paints the 
name of his disgusting commodities on the smooth faces of 
rocks and on tree-trunks. Now, any landscape, however 
grand, loses in dignity if you see " Bunkum's Patent " in- 
scribed in the foreground in whitewash letters six feet high. 



Eligible Sites for Kingdoms, 



What a mercy it is these quacks cannot advertise on the 
sky — or on running water ! 

For the river is now at its grandest and it keeps with us 
all the afternoon, showing on either side splendid waterways 
between sloping spurs of the hills densely wooded and 
strewn with great boulders. But on a sudden the mountains 
are gone and the river with them, and we speed along 
thTOUgh a region of green grass-land and abundant cultiva- 
tion. Land agents might truthfully advertise it in lots as 
" eligible sites for kingdoms." 

And so on, past townships, whose names running (at forty 
miles an hour) no man can read, and round the famous 
" horseshoe curve " — where it looks as if the train were 
trying to get its head round in order to swallow its tail — 
down into valleys already taking their evening tints of 
misty purple, and pink, and pale blue. And then Derry. 

Just before we arrived there, two freight trains had selected 
Derry as an opportune spot for a collision, and had collided 
accordingly. There could have been very little reservation 
about their collision, for the wreck was complete, and when 
we got under way again we could just make out by the 
moonlight the scattered limbs of carriages lying heaped 
about on the bank. In some places it looked as if a clumsy 
apprentice had been trying to make packing-cases out of 
freight wagons, but had given up on finding that he had 
broken the pieces too small. And they were too big for 
matches. So it was rather a useless sort of collision, after 
all — and no one was hurt 

But " the Pennsylvania Limited " has very little leisure to 
think about other people's collisions, and so we were soon 
on our way again through the moonlit country, with the 
hills in the distance lying still and black, like round-backed 
monsters sleeping, and the stations going by in sudden 



lO Sinners and Samts^ 

snatches of lamplight, and every now and then a train, its 
bell giving a wail exactly like the sound of a shell as it 
passes over the trenches. And so to Pittsburg, and, our 
*' five minutes " over, the train stole away like a hyena, 
snarling and hiccoughing, and we were again out in the 
country, with everything about us beautified by the gracious 
alchemy of the moonlight and the stars. 

And the Ohio River rolled alongside, with its steamers 
ploughing up furrows of ghostly white froth, and unwinding 
as they went long streamers of ghostly black smoke — and 
then I fell asleep. 

When I awoke next morning I was in Indiana, and very 
sunny it looked without a hill in sight to make a shadow. 
The water stood in lakes on the dead level of the country, 
and horses, cattle, sheep, and here and there a pig— a pre- 
gustation of Chicago— grazed and rooted, very well satisfied 
apparently with pastures that had no ups and downs to 
trouble them as they loitered about. And as the morning 
wore on, the people woke up, and were soon as busy as their 
windmills. In the fields the teams were ploughing; in the 
towns, the children were trooping off to school. But the 
eternal level began at last, apparently, to weary the Penn- 
sylvania Limited, for it commenced slackening speed and 
finding frivolous pretexts for coming nearly to a standstill — 
the climax being reached when we halted in front of a small, 
piebald pig. We looked at the pig and the pig looked at 
us, and the pig got the best of it, for we sneaked off, leaving 
the porker master of the situation and still looking. 

But these great flats— what a paradise of snipe they are, and 
how golf-players might revel on them ! Birds were abundant. 
Crows went about in bands recruiting " black marauders" 
in every copse ; blackbirds flew over in flocks, and small 
things of the linnet kind rose in wisps from the sedges and 



The Phoenix City, 1 1 

osiers. And there was another bird of which I did not 
then know the name, that was a surprise every time it left 
the ground, for it sate all black and flew half scarlet. Could 
not these marsh levels be utilized for the Indian water-nut, 
the singhara? In Asia where it is cultivated it ranks 
almost as a local staple of food, and is delicious. 

A noteworthy feature of the country, by the way, is the 
sudden appearance of hedge-7'ows. No detail of landscape 
that I know of makes scenery at once so English. And then 
we find ourselves steaming along past beds of osiers, with 
long waterways stretching up northwards, with here and 
there a painted duck, like the European sheldrake, floating 
under the shadows of the fir-trees, and then I became aware 
of a great green expanse of water showing through the 
trees, and I asked " What is that ? The water must be very 
deep to be such a colour." " That is Lake Michigan," 
was the answer, " and this is Chicago we are coming to 
now." 

And very soon we found ourselves in the station of the 
great city by the lake, with the masts of shipping alongside 
the funnels of engines. But not a pig in sight ! 

I had thought that Chicago was all pigs. 

And what a city it is, this central wonder of the States ! 
As a whole, Chicago is nearly terrific. The real significance 
of this phc3enix city is almost appalling. Its astonishing 
resurrection from its ashes and its tremendous energy terrify 
jelly-fishes like myself. Before they have got roads that are 
fit to be called roads, these Chicago men have piled up the 
new County Hall, to my mind one of the most imposing 
structures I have ever seen in all my wide travels. 

Chicago does not altogether seem to like it, for every one 
spoke of it as " too solid-looking," but for my part I think 
it almost superb. The architect's name, I believe, is Egan ; 



1 2 Sinners and Saints. 

but whence he got his architectural inspiration- 1 cannot 
say. It reminds me in part of a wing of the Tuileries, but 
why it does I could not make up my mind. 

Then again, look at this Chicago which allows its business 
thoroughfares to be so sumptuously neglected — some of 
them are almost as disreputable-looking as Broadway — and 
goes and lays out imperial " boulevards " to connect its 
" system of parks." These boulevards, simply if left alone 
for the trees to grow up and the turf to grow thick, will 
before long be the finest in all the world. The streets in 
the city, however, if left alone much longer, would be a dis- 
grace to— well, say Port Said. The local administration, 
they say, is *' corrupt." But that is the standing American 
explanation for everything with which a stranger finds fault. 
I was always told the same in New York — and would you 
seriously tell me that the municipal administration of New 
York is corrupt ? — to account for congestion of traffic, fat 
policemen, bad lamps, sidewalks blocked with packing- 
cases, &c , &c. iVnd in Chicago it accounts for the streets 
being more like rolling prairie than streets, for cigar stores 
being houses of assignation, for there being so much orange 
peel and banana skin on the sidewalks, <fcc., &c. But I 
am not at all sure that " municipal corruption " is not a 
scapegoat for want of public spirit. 

But let the public spirit be as it may, there can be no 
doubt as to the private enterprise in Chicago. Take the 
iron industry alone — what prodigious proportions it is 
assuming, and how vastly it will be increased when that 
circum-urban " belt line " of railways is completed ! Take, 
again, the Pullman factories. They by themselves form 
an industry which might satisfy any town of moderate 
appetite. But Chicago is a veritable glutton for speculative 
trade. 



Street Scenes. 



13 



The streets at all times abound with incident. Here at one 
corner was a Hansom cab, surely the very latest develop- 
ment of European science, with two small black children, 
looking like imps in a Drury Lane pantomime, trying to pin 
" April Fool " on to the cabman's dependent tails. Could 
anything be more incongruous? In the first place, what 
have negro children to do with April fooling ? and in the 
next, imagine these small scraps in ebony taking liberties 
with a Hansom ! A group of cowboy- and-miner looking 
men were grouped in ludicrous attitudes of sentimentality 
before a concertina-player, who was wheezing out his own 
version of '' old country " airs. On the arm of one of the 
group languished a lady with a very dark skin, dressed in a 
rich black silk dress, with a black satin mantle trimmed with 
sumptuous fur, and half an ostrich on her head by way of 
bonnet and feathers. The men there, as in most of America, 
strike me as being very judicious in the arrangement of their 
personal appearance, especially in the trimming of their hair 
and moustachios ; but many of the women — I speak now of 
Chicago — sacrificed everything to that awful Amercan insti- 
tution, the "bang." 

I know of no female head-dress in Asia, Africa, or Europe 
so absurd in itself or so lunatic in the wearer as some of the 
Chicago bangs. Ugliness of face is intensified a thousand- 
fold by "the ring-worm Ftyle " of head-dress with which 
they cover their foreheads and half their cheeks. Prettiness 
of face can, of course, never be hidden ; but I honestly think 
that neither a black skin, nor lip-rings and nose-rings, nor 
red teeth, nor any other fantastic female fashion that I have 
ever seen in other parts of the world, goes so far towards 
concealing beauty of features as that curly plastering which, 
from ignorance of its real name, I have called " the ring 
worm style of bang. " 



1 4 Sinners and Saints, 

Here, too, in Chicago I found a man selling "gophers." 
Now, I do not know the American name for this vanish- 
into-nothing sort of pastry, but I do know that there is one 
man in London who declares that he, and he alone in all the 
world, is aware of the secret of the gopher. And all London 
believes him. His is supposed to be a lost art— but for him 
— and I should not be surprised if some lover of the antique 
were to bribe him to bequeath the precious secret to an 
heir before he dies. But in Chicago peripatetic vendors of 
this cate are an e very-day occurrence, and even the juvenile 
Ethiop sometimes compasses the gopher. What its Ame- 
rican name is I cannot say ; but it is a very delicate kind of 
pastry punched into small square depressions, and every 
mouthful you eat is so inappreciable in point of matter that 
you look down on your waistcoat to see if you have not 
dropped it, and when the whole is done you feel that you 
have consumed about as much solid nutriment as a fish 
does after a nibble at an artificial bait. Have you ever 
given a dog a piece of warm fat off" your plate and seen him 
after he had swallowed it look on the carpet for it ? So rapid 
is the transit of the delicious thing that the deluded animal 
fancies that he has as yet enjoyed only the foretaste of a 
pleasure still to be, the shadow only of the coming event, 
the promise of something good. It is just the same with 
yourself after eating a gopher. 

Of course I went to see the stock-yards, and my visit, as 
it happened, had something of a special character, for I saw 
a pig put through its performances in thirty-Jive seconds. A 
lively piebald porker was one of a number grunting and 
quarrelling in a pen, and I was asked to keep my eye on 
him. And what happened to that porker was this. He 

1 Need I say that I do not refer to the small field-rat of that 
name? 



From Pig to Pork. 1 5 

was suddenly seized by a hind leg, and jerked up on to a 
small crane. This swung him swiftly to the fatal door 
through which no pig ever returns. On the other side stood 
a man — 

That two-handed engine at the door 
Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more, 

and the dead pig shot across a trough and through another 
doorway, and then there was a splash ! He had fallen head 
first into a vat of boiling water. Some unseen machinery 
passed him along swiftly to the other end of the terrible 
bath, and there a water-wheel picked him up and flung him 
out on to a sloping counter. Here another machine seized 
him, and with one revolution scraped him as bald as a nut. 
And down the counter he went, losing his head as he slid 
past a man with a hatchet, and then, presto ! he was up 
again by the heels. In one dreadful handful a man emptied 
him, and while another squirted him with fresh water, the 
pig — registering his own weight a§ he passed the teller's 
box — shot down the steel bar from which he hung, and 
whisked round the corner into the ice-house. One long cut 
of a knife made two " sides of pork " out of that piebald 
pig. Two hacks of a hatchet brought away his backbone. 
And there, in thirty-five seconds from his last grunt — dirty, 
hot-headed, noisy — the pig was hanging up in two pieces, 
clean, tranquil, iced! 

The very rapidity of the whole process robbed it of all its 
horrors. It even added the ludicrous to it. Here one 
minute was an opinionated piebald pig making a prodigious 
fuss about having his hind leg taken hold of, and lo ! before 
he had even made up his mind whether to squeal or only 
to squeak, he was hanging up in an ice-house, split in two ! 
He had resented the first trifling liberty that was taken with 
him, and /;/ thirty-five seconds he was ready for the cook ! 



1 6 Sinners and Saints, 

That the whole process is virtually painless is beyond all 
doubt, for it is only for the first fraction of the thirty-odd 
seconds that the pig is sentient, and I doubt if even 
electricity could as suddenly and painlessly extinguish life 
as the lightning of that unerring poniard, " the dagger of 
mercy" and the instantaneous plunge into the scalding 
bath. 

Of the Chicago stock-yards, a veritable village, laid out 
with its miniature avenues intersecting its mimic streets and 
numbered blocks, it is late in the day to speak. But it was 
very interesting in its way to see the poor doomed swine 
thoughtlessly grunting along the road, and inquisitively 
asking their way, as it seemed, of the sheep in Block 9 or of 
the sulky Texan steer looking out between the palings of 
Block 7 ; to watch the cattle, wild-eyed from distress and 
long journeying, snorting their distrust of their surroundings, 
and trying at every opportunity to turn away from the 
terribly straight road that leads to death, into any crossvvay 
that seemed likely to result in freedom ; to see for the first 
time the groups of Western herdsmen lounging at the 
comers, while their unkempt ponies, guarded in most cases 
by drowsy shepherd-dogs, stood tethered in bunches against 
the palings. All day long the air is filled with porcine 
clamour, and some of the pens are scenes of perpetual riot. 
For the pig does not chant his '^ nunc dimittis " with any 
seemliness. His last canticles are frivolous. It is impossi- 
ble to translate them into any " morituri te salutant," for 
they are wanting in dignity, and even self-respect. With 
the cattle it is very different. But few of them were in such 
good case as to make high spirits possible, and many were 
wretched objects to look at. Dead calves lay about in the 
pens, and there was a general air of distress that made the 
scene abundantly pathetic. But, after all, it does not pay 



The Sparrow Line. 1 7 

to starve or overdrive cattle, and we may confidently expect 
therefore, that in Chicago, of all places in the world, they 
are neither starved nor overdriven systematically. 

The English sparrow has multiplied with characteristic 
industry in Chicago, but further west I lost it. I saw 
none between Omaha and Salt Lake City. So the sparrow 
line, I take it, must be drawn for the present somewhere 
west of Clinton. I do not think it has crossed the Missis- 
sippi yet from the east. But it is steadily advancing its 
frontiers— this aggressive fowl— from both sea-boards, and 
just as it has pushed itself forward from the Atlantic 
into Illinois, so from the Pacific it has got already as far 
as Nevada. The tyranny of the sparrow is the price men 
pay for civilization. Only savages are exempt. Here in 
America, they have developed into a multitudinous evil, 
dispossessing with a high hand the children of the soil, 
thrusting their Saxon assumption of superiority upon the 
native feathered fiock of grove and garden, and driving 
them from their birthright. They have no respect for 
authorities, and entertain no awe even for the Irish aldermen 
of New York. In Australia it is the same. Imported as a 
treasure, they have presumed upon the sentiment of exiled 
Englishmen until they have become a veritable calamity. 
So they have been publicly proclaimed as " vermin," and a 
price set upon their heads "per hundred." Indeed, legis- 
latures threaten to stand or fall upon the sparrow question. 
Here in America, men and women began by putting 
nesting-boxes for the birds in the trees and at corners 
of houses ; I am much mistaken if before long they do not 
end by putting up ladders against the trees to help the 
cats to get up to catch the sparrows. 

I looked everywhere for " Chicago Mountain " — a New 
England joke against the Phoenix City— and at last found it 

c 



1 8 Sinners and Saints. 

behind a house at the corner of Pine and Colorado streets. 
They say (in Boston) that Chicago, being chaffed about 
having no high land near it, set to work to build itself a 
mountain, but that when it had reached its present moderate 
elevation of a few feet, the city abandoned the project. 
But I am inclined to think that this fiction is due to the 
spite of the New Englanders, who, it is notorious, have to 
sharpen the noses of their sheep to enable them to reach the 
grass that grows between the stones ; for on looking at 
the mountain in question I perceived it to be merely a 
natural sand-dune which it has not been thought worth 
while to clear away. Further to acquaint myself with the 
city, I went into sundry "penny gaffs," or cafes chantants, 
and found them to my surprise patronized by groups of men 
sad almost to melancholy. It was the music, I think, that 
made them feel so. Its effect on me I know was very 
chastening. I felt inclined to lift up my voice and howl. 
But the intense gravity of the company restrained me, and 
I left. Yet I am told that inside these very places men stab 
each other with Bowie knives and shoot each other with 
revolvers, and are even sometimes quite disagreeable in their 
manners. But so far as my own experience goes I seldom 
saw a gathering so unanimously solemn. I might even say 
so tearful. It is possible, of course, that the music eventually 
maddens them, that it works them up about midnight into 
a homicidal melancholy. But there was no profligacy of 
blood-shedding while I was there. 

They did not even offer to murder a musician. 



Rival Fathers of Waters, 1 9 



CHAPTER II. 

FROM CHICAGO TO DENVER. 

Fathers of Waters— " Rich Lands lie Flat"— The Misery River- 
Council Bluffs — A "Live" town, sir— Two murders : a contrast — 
Omaha — The immorality of "writing up " — On the prairies — The 
modesty of " Wish-ton- Wish " — The antelope's tower of refuge 
— Out of Nebraska into Colorado — Man-eating Tiger.. 

From Chicago to Omaha by the '' Chicago and North- 
western" route is not an exhilarating journey. When 
Nature begins to make anything out here in iVmerica she 
never seems to know when to stop. She can never make 
a few of anything. For instance, it might have been 
thought that one or two hundred miles of perfectly flat land 
was enough at a time. But Nature, having once com- 
menced flattening out the land, cannot leave off. So all 
the way from Chicago to Omaha there is the one same 
pattern of country, a wilderness of maize-stubble and virgin 
land, broken only for the first half of the way by occasional 
patches of water-oak, and for the second half of willows. 

Just on the frontier-line of these two vegetable divisions of 
the country lies a tract of bright turf-land. What a magician 
this same turf is ! It is Wendell Holmes, I think, who 
says that Anglo-Saxons emigrate only " in the line of ti/rf." 

The better half of the journey passed on Sunday, and the 
people were all out in loitering, well-dressed groups " to see 
the train pass," and at the stations where we stopped, to see 

c 2 



20 Sinners and Saints, 

the passengers, too. Where they came from it was not easy 
to tell, for the homesteads in sight were very few and far 
between. Yet there they were, happy, healthy, w^ell- to-do 
contented-looking families, enjoying the Day of Rest — the 
one dissipation of the hard-worked week. What a com- 
fortable connecting link with the outer world the railway 
must be to these scattered dwellers on this prairie-land ! 

So through Illinois to the Mississippi. How wonderfully 
it resembles the Indus where it flows past Lower Sind. A 
minaret or two, a blue-tiled cupola and a clump of palms 
would make the resemblance of the Mississippi at 
Clinton to the Indus below Rohri complete. And both 
rivers claim to be " the Father of Waters." I w^ould not 
undertake to decide between them. In modern annals, of 
course, the American must take pre-eminence ; but what 
can surpass the historic grandeur that dignifies the Indian 
stream ? 

And so into Iowa, just as flat, and as rich, and as mono- 
tonous as Illinois, and with just the same leagues of maize- 
stubble, unbroken soil, water-oaks and willows. And then, 
in the deepening twilight, to Cedar Rapids, with the 
pleasant sound of rushing water and all the townsfolk wait- 
ing " to see the train " on their way from church, standing in 
groups, with their prayer-books and Bibles in their hands. 

By the way, what an admirable significance there is in 
the care with which these young townships discharge their 
duties to their religion and the dead. The church or 
prayer-house seems to be always one of the first and finest 
buildings. With only half-a-dozen homesteads in sight in 
some places, there is " the church," and while all the rest 
are of the humblest class of frame houses, the church is 
of brick. The cemeteries again. Before even the plots 
round the living are set in order, " God's acre " (often 



Blue Grass and Green, 2 1 

the best site in the neighbourhood) is neatly fenced and 
laid out. 

And I thought it somehow a beautiful touch of national 
character, this reverent providence for the dead that are to 
come. And just before I went to sleep, I saw out in the 
moonlit country a cemetery, and on the crest of the rising 
ground stood one solitary tombstone, the pioneer of the 
many — the first dead settler's grave. In this new country 
the living are as yet in the majority ! 

Awakening, find myself still in Iowa, and Iowa still as 
flat as ever. Not spirit enough in all these hundred miles 
of land to firk up even a hillock, a mound, a pimple. But 
to make a new proverb, "Rich lands lie flat;" and Iowa, in 
time, will be able to feed the world — aye, and to clothe it too 

In the mean time we are approaching the Missouri^ 
through levels in which the jack-rabbit abounds, and every 
farmer, therefore, seems to keep a greyhound for coursing 
the long-eared aborigines. The willows, conscious of 
secret resources of water, are already in leaf, and overhead 
the wild ducks and geese are passing to their feeding- 
grounds. Here I saw " blue " grass for the first time, and 
I must say I am glad that grass is usually green. Elsewhere 
in the States, English grass is called " blue grass ;" but in 
some parts, as here in this part of Iowa, there is a native 
grass which is literally blue. And it is not an improvement, 
so far as the effect on the landscape goes, upon the old 
fashioned colour for grass. And then the Missouri, a 
muddy, shapeless, dissipated stream. The people on its 
banks call it "treacherous," and pronounce its name 
*' Misery." It is certainly a most unprepossessing river, with 
its ill-gotten banks of ugly sand, and its lazy brown waters 
gurgling along in an overgrown, self-satisfied way. It is a 
bullying stream; gives nobody peace that lives near it; and 



22 Sinners and Saints, 

is perpetually trying in an underhanded sort of way to 
" scour " out the foundations of the hollow columns on 
which the bridges across it are built. But the abundance 
of water-fowl upon its banks and side-waters is a redeeming 
feature for all who care to carry a gun, and I confess I 
should like to have had a day's leisure at Council Bluffs to 
go out and have a shot. The inhabitants of the place, 
however, do not seem to be goose-eaters, for, close season 
or not, I cannot imagine their permitting flocks of these 
eminently edible birds to fly circling about over their houses, 
within forty yards of the ground. The wild-goose is pro- 
verbially a wary fowl, but here at Council Bluffs they have 
apparently become from long immunity as impertinent and 
careless as sparrows. 

Council Bluffs, as the pow-wow place of the Red Men in 
the days when Iowa was rolling prairie and bison used 
to browse where horses plough, has many a quaint legend 
of the past ; and in spite of the frame houses that are 
clustered below them and the superb cobweb bridge — it has 
few rivals in the world — that here spans the Missouri, the 
Bluffs, as the rendezvous of Sagamore and Sachem, stand out 
from the interminable plains eloquent of a very picturesque 
antiquity. And so to Omaha. 

" But I guess, sir, Om'a's a live town. Yes, sir, a live 
town''' 

My experiences of Omaha were too brief for me to be just, 
too disagreeable for me to be impartial. Before breakfast 
1 saw a murder and suicide, and between breakfast and 
luncheon a fire and several dog-fights. Perhaps I might 
have seen something more. But a terrible dust-storm 
raged in the streets all day. Besides, 1 went away. 

I am beginning already to hate " live " towns. 



Two Murders : a Contrast, 23 



It was during the Afghan War. I had just ridden back 
from General Roberts' camp in the Thull Valley, on the 
frontiers of Afghanistan, and found myself stopped on my 
return at the Kohat Pass. *' It is the orders of Govern- 
ment," said the sentry: " the Pass is unsafe for travellers." 

But I had to get through the Pass whether it was " safe " 
or not, for through it lay the only road to General Browne's 
camp, to which I was attached. So I dismounted, and 
after a great deal of palaver, partly of bribes, partly of un- 
truths, I not only got past the native sentries, but got a 
guide to escort me, through the thirty miles of wild Afridi 
defiles that lay before me. The scenery is, I think, among 
the finest in the world, while, added to all is the strange 
fascination of the knowledge that the peoj^le who live in the 
Pass have cherished from generation to generation the 
most vindictive blood feuds. The villages are surrounded 
by high walls, loopholed along the top, and the huts in the 
inside are built against the wall, so that the roofs of them 
can be used by the men of the village as lounges during the 
day, and as ramparts for sentries during the night. Within 
these sullen squares each clan lives in perpetual siege. The 
women and children are at all times permitted to go to 
and fro ; but for the men, woe to him who happens to stray 
within reach of the jezails that lie all ready loaded in the 
loopholes of the next rillage. The crops are sown and 
reaped by men with guns slung on their backs, and in 
the middle of every field stands a martello-tower, in which 
the peasants can take shelter if neighbours sally out to 
attack them while at work. Rope-ladders hang from a 
doorway half-way up the tower, and up this, like lizards, 
the men scramble, one after the other, as soon as danger 



24 Sinners and Saints, 

threatens, draw in the ladder, and through the loop-holes 
overlook their menaced crops. 

A wonderful country truly, and something in the air to day 
that makes my guide ride as hard as the road will permit, 
with his sword drawn across the saddle before him. My 
revolver is in my hand. And so we clatter along, mile after 
mile, through the beautiful series of little valleys, grim vil- 
lages, and towers. Now and again a party of women will 
step aside to let us pass, or a dog start up to bark at us, but 
not a single man do we see. Yet I know very well that 
hundreds of men see us ride by, and that a jezail is 
lying at every loophole, and covering the very path we ride 
on. 

We reach a sudden turn of the path ; my guide gallops 
Tound it. He is hardly out of my sight when Baiigt 
bang ! It is no use pulling up, and the next instant I am 
round the corner too. A man, with his jezail still smoking' 
from the last shot, starts up from the undergrowth almost 
under my horse's feet, and narrowly escapes being ridden 
down. Another man comes running down the hillside to- 
wards him. In front of me, some fifty yards off, is my 
guide, with his horse's head towards me and his sword in his 
hand, and on the path, midway between us, lies a heap of 
brightly-coloured clothing— a dead Afridi ! For a second 
both guide and I thought that it was we who had 
drawn the fire from the ambushed men. But no, it was 
the poor Afridi lad lying there in the path before us, and the 
victim of a blood feud. He had tried, no doubt, to steal 
across from his own village to some friendly hamlet close 
by^ but his lynx-eyed enemies had seen him, and, lying 
there on either side of his path, had shot him as he 
passed. 

But what a group we were ! Myself, with my revolver 



Two Murders : a Contrast. 2 5 

in my hand, looking, horror-stricken, now at the dead, and 
now at his murderers ; my guide, in the splendid uniform 
of the Indian irregular cavalry, emotionless as only Orientals 
can be ; the two murderers talking together excitedly ; in 
the middle of us the dead lad ! But there was still another 
figure to be added, for suddenly, along the very path by 
which the victim had come, there came running an old 
woman — perhaps she had followed the lad with a mother's 
tender anxiety for his safety — and in an instant she saw the 
worst. Without a glance at any of us, she flung herself 
down with the cry of a breaking heart, by the dead boy's 
side, and as my guide turned to ride on and I followed him, 
as the murderers slipped away into the undergrowth, we 
all heard her crooning, between her sobs, over the body of 
her murdered son. 

II. 

I was in Omaha. I had just crossed Thirteenth Street, 
and, turning to look as I passed, at the Catholic church, 
had caught an idle glimpse of the folk in the street. Among 
them was a woman at the wooden gateway of a small house, 
hesitating, so it seemed to me afterwards, about pushing it 
open, for though she had her hand upon the latch, yet she 
did not lift it, but appeared to me, at the distance I passed 
and the cursory glance I gave, to be listening to what some- 
body was saying to her through the window. Had I been 
only a few yards nearer ! At the moment that I saw her, 
the wretched woman was gazing with fixed and horrified 
eyes upon a face — a grim and cruel face — that glared at her 
from a window, and at a gun that she saw was pointed full at 
her breast. And the next instant, just as I had turned the 
corner, there was the report of fire-arms. It did not occur 
to me to stop. But suddenly I heard a cry, and then a 
second shot, and somehow there flashed upon my mind the 



26 Sinners and Saints, 

picture of that hesitating woman by the wicket, with her 
knitted shawl over her head, and the wind blowing her light 
dress to one side. 

I did not turn back, however. For the woman and the 
shots had only the merest flash of a connexion in my 
mind. But after a few steps a man came running past me, 
going perhaps for the doctor, or the police, or the coroner, 
and the scared look on his face suddenly once more 
wrenched back to my imagination the woman at the 
wicket. 

So I turned back into Thirteenth Street, and there, in the 
middle of the road, with a man stooping over her and two 
women, transfixed by sudden terror into attitudes that 
were most tragic, I saw the woman lying. Her face was 
turned up to the bright sunlit sky, her shawl had fallen 
back about her neck, and her hair lay in the dust. She was 
already dead. And her murderer ? He too had gone to 
his last account ; and as I stood there in that dreary Omaha 
road, with the wind raising wisps of dust about the horror- 
stricken group, and thought of the two dead bodies lying 
there, one in the roadway, the other in the house close by, 
my mind reverted involuntarily to the fancy that at that very 
moment the two souls, man and wife, were standing before 
their Maker, and that perhaps she, the poor mangled 
woman, was pleading for mercy for the man, her husband, 
the lover of her youth — her murderer. 



In the evening, when a cool breeze was blowing, and imagi- 
nation pictured the trees holding up screens of green foliage 
before the hotel windows to shut out the ugly views of half- 
built streets, I entertained feelings that were almost kindly 
towards Omaha; but the memory of the day that was 



Live''' Town^ Sir, 27 



happily past, as often as it recurred to me, changed them to 
gall again. All day long there had been a flaring, glaring 
sun overhead and the wind that was blowing would have done 
credit to the deserts through which I have since marched with 
the army in Egypt. It went howling down the street with the 
voices of wild beasts, and carried with it such simooms of 
sand as would probably in a week overwhelm and bury in 
Ninevite oblivion the buildings of this aspiring town. And 
not only sand, but whirlwinds of vulgar dust also, with occa- 
sional discharges of cinders, that came rushing along the 
road, picking up all the rubbish it could find, dodging up 
alleys and coming out again with accumulations of straw, 
rampaging into courtyards in search of paper and rags, 
standing still in the middle of the roadway to whirl, and 
altogether behaving itself just as a disreputable and aggres- 
sive vagabond may be always expected to behave. Of 
course I was told it was a " very exceptional " day. 
It always is a "very exceptional day" wherever a 
stranger goes. But I must confess that I never saw any 
place — except Aden, and perhaps East London, in South 
Africa — that struck me on short acquaintance as so 
thoroughly undesirable for a lengthened abode. The big 
black swine rooting about in the back yards, the little black 
boys playing drearily at "marbles" with bits of stone, the 
multitude of dogs loafing on the sidewalks, the depressing 
inegularity of the streets, the paucity of shade-trees, the 
sandy bluffs that dominate the town and hold over the heads 
of the inhabitants the perpetual threat of siroccos, and the 
general appearance (however false it may have been) of 
disorder — all combined with various degrees of force to give 
the impression that Omaha is a place that had from some cause 
or another been suddenly checked in its natural expansion. 
Its geographical position is indisputably a commanding 



28 Sinners and Saints, 

one, and already the great smelting works, with one ex- 
ception the busiest in the States, the splendid workshops of 
the Union Pacific Railway, and the thriving distillery close 
by, give promise of the great industries which in the future 
this town, with its wonderful advantages of communication, 
as the meeting-point of great railway high-roads, will attract 
to itself Omaha has an admirable opera-house, and when 
its hotel is rebuilt it will be able to offer visitors good 
accommodation. It has also an imposing school-house im- 
posingly advertised by being on top of a hill, and the 
refining grace of gardens is not completely absent, while the 
" stove-pipe " hat gives fragmentary evidence of advanced 
civilization. But all this affords encouragement for the 
future only ; at present Omaha is a depressing spot. And 
so I left the town without regret ; but I did not make 
any effort to shake off the dust of Omaha. That was im- 
possible ; it had penetrated the texture of my clothing so 
completely that nothing but shredding my garments into 
their original threads would have sufficed. 

Now I had read something of Omaha before I went 
there, had seen it called " a splendid Western city," and 
been invited to linger there to examine its " dozens of noble 
monuments to invincible enterprise," which, with " the dozen 
or more church spires," are supposed to break the sky-line 
of the view of this " mctropoHs of the North-western States 
and Territories." It is possible, therefore, that my profound 
disappointment with the reality, after reading such exagge- 
rated description, may have tinged my opinion of Omaha, 
and, combined with the unfortunately " exceptional " day 
I spent there, have made me think very poorly of the former 
capital of Nebraska. That it has a great future before it, its 
position alone guarantees, and the enterprise of Nebraska 
puts beyond all doubt ; but the sight-seer going to Omaha, 



Fiction and Fact. 29 

and expecting to find it anything but a very new town on a 
very unprepossessing site, will be as greatly disappointed as 
I was. 

Equally unfortunate is the " writing up " which the Valley 
of the Platte has received. Who, for instance, that has 
travelled on the railway along that great void can read with- 
out annoyance of "beautiful valley landscapes, in which 
thousands of productive farms, fine farm-houses, blossoming 
orchards, and tJiriving cities " are features of the country 
traversed ? No one can charge me with a want of sympathy 
with the true significance of this wonderful Western country. 
And I can say, therefore, without hesitation that the dreami- 
ness of the country between Omaha and Denver Junction is 
almost inconceivable. There is hardly even a town worth 
calling such in sight, much less "thriving cities." The 
original prairie lies there spread out, on either hand, in 
nearly all its original barrenness. Interminable plains, that 
occasionally roll into waves, stretch away to the horizon to 
right and left, dotted with skeletons of dead cattle and 
widely scattered herds of living ones. Here and there a 
cow-boy's shed, and here and there a ranch of the ordinary 
primitive type, and here and there a dug-out, are all the 
" features " of the long ride. An occasional emigrant waggon 
perhaps breaks the dull, dead monotony of the landscape, 
and in one place there is a solitary bush upon a mound. A 
hawk floats in the air above a prairie-dog village. A plover 
sweeps past with its melancholy cry. 

iVt?, the journey to North Platte — where a very bad break- 
fast was put before us at a dollar a head— is not attractive. 
But here again it is the Possible in the future that makes the 
now desolate scene so full of interest and so splendidly 
significant. As a grazing country it can never, perhaps, be 
very populous ; but in time, of course, those ranches, now 



30 Sinners and Saints. 

struggling so bravely against terrible odds, will become 
*' fine farm-houses," and have " blossoming orchards " about 
them. But as yet these things are not, and for good, all- 
round dreariness I would not know where to send a friend 
with such confidence as to the pastures between Omaha. and 
North Platte. 

Oh ! when are we to have Pullman palace balloons ? 
Condemned to travel, my soul and my bones cry out for 
air- voyaging. 

That some day man should fly like a bird has been, in 
spite of superstition, an article of honest belief from the 
beginning of time, and in the dove of Archytas alone we 
have proof enough that, even in those days, the successful 
accompUshment of flight was accepted as a fact of science. 
During the Middle Ages so common was this belief that 
every man who dabbled in physics was pronounced a magi- 
cian, and as such was credited with the power of transport- 
ing himself through the air at will. Some, indeed, actually 
claimed the enviable privilege, Friar Bacon among others. 
But history records no practical illustration of their control 
of the air, while more than one death is chronicled of daring 
men who, with insufficient apparatus, launched themselves 
in imitation of birds upon space, and fell, more or less 
^^^recipitately, to earth. The Italian who flapped himself off 
Stirling Castle trusted only to a pair of huge feather wings, 
which he had tied on to his arms, and got no farther on his 
way to France than the heads of the spectators at the bottom 
of the wall ; while the Monk of Tiibingen started on his 
journey from the top of his tower with apparatus that im- 
mediately turned inside out, and increased by its weight the 
momentum with which he came down plumb into the street. 

Beyond North Platte the same melancholy expanses again 
commence, the same rolling prairies, with the same dead 



The Modesty of Prairie-dogs. 31 

cattle and the same herds of live ones, an occasional waggon 
or a stock-yard or snow-fence being all that interrupts the 
flat monotony. But approaching Sterling a suspicion of 
verdure begins in places to steal over the grey prairie, and 
flights of " larks," with a bright, pleasant note, give some- 
thing of an air of animation to isolated spots. Here is a 
plough at work, the first we have passed, I think, since we 
left Omaha, and the plover piping overhead seem to resent 
the novelty. Cattle continue to dot the landscape, and all 
the afternoon the Platte rolls along a sluggish stream parallel 
to the track. 

The train happened to slacken pace at one point, and a 
man came up to the cars. He was a beggar, and asked our 
help to get along the road "eastward." One of his arms 
was in a sHng from an accident, and his whole appearance 
eloquent of utter destitution. And the very landscape 
pleaded for him. Beggary at any time must be wretched- 
ness, but here in this bleak waste of pasturage it nmst almost 
be despair. And as the train sped on, the one dismal figure 
creeping along by the side of the track, with the dark clouds 
of a snowstorm coming' up to meet him, was strangely 
pathetic. 

And then Sterling. May Sterling be forgiven for the 
dinner it set before us ! 

And then on again, across long leagues of level plain, 
thickly studded with prickly pear patches and seamed with 
the old bison and antelope tracks leading down from the 
hills to the river. There are no bison now. They cannot 
stand before the stove-pipe hat. The sombreroed hunter, 
with his lasso, the necklace of death, was an annoyance to 
them ; they spent their lives dodging him. The befeathered 
Indian, "the chivalry of the prairie," who pincushioned 
their hides full of arrows, was a terror to them, and they fell 



32 Sinners and Saints, 

by thousands. But before the stove-pipe hat the bison 
fled incontinently by the herd, and have never returned. 

The prairie-dogs peep out of their holes at us as we 
passed. The bashfulness of " Wish-ton-Wish," as the Red 
Man calls the prairie-dog, is as nearly impudence as 
one thing can be another. It sits up perkily on one 
end at the edge of its hole till you are close upon it, 
and then, with a sudden affectation of being shocked at its 
own immodesty, dives headlong into its hole ; but its hind- 
legs are not out of sight before the head is up again, and the 
next instant there is the prairie-dog sitting exactly where you 
first saw it ! Such a burlesque of shyness I never saw in a 
quadruped before. 

A solitary coyote was loitering in a hungry way along a 
gulch, and I could not help thinking how the most important 
epochs of one's life may often turn upon the merest trifles. 
Now, here was a coyote ambling lazily up a certain gulch 
because it had happened to see some white bones bleaching 
a little way up it. But in the very next gulch, which the 
coyote had 7iot happened to go up, were three half-bred 
greyhounds idling about, just in the humour for something 
to run after. But they could not see the coyote, though it 
was really only a few yards off, nor could the coyote see 
them. So the dogs lounged about in a listless, do-nothing, 
tired-of-life sort of way, thinking existence as dull as ditch 
water, while the coyote, unconscious of the narrow escape 
of its life that it ran, trotted slowly along — scrutinized the 
old bones — scratched its head — yawned out of sheer ennui, 
and then trotted along again. Now, what a difference it 
would have made to those three dogs if they had only 
happened to loaf into the next gulch ! And what a pro- 
digious difference it would have made to the coyote if it had 
happened to loaf into the next gulch ! 



The Antelopes Toiver of Refuge. 33 

The prickly pear, that ugly, fleshy little cactus, with its 
sudden summer glories of crimson and golden blossoms, 
fulfils a strange purpose in the animal economy of the 
prairies. In itself it appears to be one of the veriest out- 
casts among vegetables, execrated by man and refused as 
food by beast. Yet if it were not for this plant the herds 
of prairie antelope would have fared badly enough, for 
the antelope, whenever they found themselves in straits 
from wolves or from dogs, made straight for the prickly 
pear patches and belts, and there, standing right out on the 
barren, open plain, defied their swift but tender-footed pur- 
suers to come near them. For the small, thick pads of the 
cactus, though they lie so flat and insignificantly upon the 
ground, are studded with tufts of strong, fierce spines, and 
woe to the wolf or the dog that treads upon them. The 
antelope's hoofs, however, are proof against the spines, and 
one leap across such a belt suffices to place the horned folk 
in safety. These patches and belts, then, so trivial to the 
eye, and in some places almost invisible to the cursory 
glance, are in reality Towers of Refuge to the great edible 
division of the wild prairie nations^ and as impassable to the 
eaters as was that girdle of fire and steel which Von Moltke 
buckled so closely round the city of the Napoleons. 

But here we are approaching Denver. The cottonwood 
has mustered into clusters, a prototype of the future of these 
now scattered ranches. Dotted about here and there in 
suitable corners, on river bank or under sheltering bluff, 
single trees are growing side by side with single stockyards 
or single cow-boys' huts, but every now and again, where 
nature offers them a good site for a colony, the trees congre- 
gate, select lots, and permanently locate. It is not very 
different after all, with human beings. 

Nature here is undoubtedly tempting, and Denver 



34 Sinners and Saints. 

itself must surely be one of the most beautiful towns in 
the States. Through great reaches of splendid farm-land, 
with water in abundance and the cottonwood and willow 
growing thickly, we pass to our destination as the twilight 
settles on the country. 

A whole day has again been spent in the train! We had 
awaked in the morning to see from the car windows the 
people of Nebraska going out to their day's work in the 
fields, and here in the evening we sit and watch the Colo- 
rado folk coming home to their rest after the day's work is 
over. Truly this steam is a Latter-Day apocalypse and this 
America a land of magnificent distances. 

I found out on this trip that my fellow-travellers (and the 
fact holds good nearly all over America) took the greatest 
interest in British India, and finding that I had spent so 
many years there, they plied me with questions. On some 
journeys it would be the political aspect of our government 
of Hindostan that interested, at others the commercial or 
the social. But going through Colorado, one of the haunts 
of the " grizzly " and the " mountain lion," I had to detail 
my experiences of sport in India. Above all, the tiger 
interested them. It is the only animal in the world that 
may be said to give the grizzly a point or two. And there 
are some even who deny this ; but I, who have shot the 
tiger, and never seen a grizzly, naturally concede the first 
place in perilous courage to Stripes, the raja of the 
jungle. In one particular aspect, at any rate, the tiger is 
supreme among quadrupeds. It has the splendid audacity 
to make man his regular food. 

Now, it is generally supposed that the " man-eater " 
is a specially formidable variety of the species ; that it is 
only the boldest, strongest, and fiercest of the tigers that 
preys on man. But the very reverse is of course the truth. 



Man-eating Tigers. 35 

When hale and strong the tiger avoids the vicinity of men, 
finding abundant food in the herds of deer and other wild 
animals that share his jungles. But when strength and 
speed of limb begin to fail, the brute has to look for easier 
prey than the courageous bison or wind-footed antelope, and 
so skulks among the ravines and waste patches of woodland 
that are to be found about nearly every village. Then when 
twilight obscures the scene, he creeps out noiseless as a 
shadow, and lies in ambush in a crop of standing grain or 
bhair-tree brake, and watches the country folk go by from 
the fields in twos and threes, driving their plough cattle 
before them. After a while, there comes sauntering past 
alone, a man or a woman who has lagged behind the com- 
pany 3 yet not so far behind but that the friends ahead can 
hear the scream which tells of the tiger's leap, though too 
far for help to be of use. During four years 350 human 
beings and 24,000 head of cattle were killed by these 
animals in one district in Bombay, while many single tigers 
have been known to destroy over a hundred people before 
they were shot. One in the Mandla district caused the de- 
sertion of thirteen villages and threw out of cultivation two 
hundred and fifty square miles of country ; while another, 
only one of many similar cases, was credited with the appal- 
ling total of eighty human victims per annum ! The yearly 
loss in cattle and by decrease of cultivation through the 
ravages of these fearful beasts has been estimated at ten 
million pounds sterling ! 

No wonder, then, that even these doughty grizzly-slayers 
of the Rockies respect the tiger's name. 



D 2 



2,6 Sinners and Saints. 



CHAPTER III. 

IN LEADVILLE. 

The South Park line— Oscar "Wilde on sunflowers as food— In a 
wash-hand basin — Anti- Vigilance Committees — Leadville the city 
of the carbonates — "Busted" millionaires— The philosophy of 
thick boots — Colorado miners — National competition in lions — 
Abuse of the terms " gentleman " and " lady " — Up at the mines 
— Under the pine-trees. 

Starting from Denver for Leadville in the evening, it 
seemed as if we were fated to see nothing of the very 
interesting country through which the South Park line 
runs. At first there is nothing to look at but open prairie 
land sprinkled with the homesteads of agricultural pioneers, 
but as the moon got up there was gradually revealed 
a stately succession of mountain ridges, and in about 
two hours we found ourselves threading the spurs of the 
Sangre di Christi range and following the Platte River up 
toward its sources. Crossing and recrossing the canon, with 
one side silvered, and the other thrown into the blackest 
shadow by the moon, and the noisy stream tumbling along 
beside us in its hurry to get down to the lazy levels of the 
great Nebraska Valley, I saw glimpses of scenery that 
can never be forgotten. It was fantastic in the extreme ; 
for apart from the jugglery of moonlight, in itself so won- 
derful always, the ideas of relative distance and size, even 
of shape, were upset and ridiculed by the snowy peaks 
that here and there thrust themselves up into the sky and by 



Feats of Engineering, 37 

the patches and streaks of snow that concealed and altered 
the contour of the nearer rocks in the most puzzling manner 
imaginable. And all this time the little train — for the line 
is narrow-gauge — kept twisting and wriggling in and out as if 
\X. were in collusion with the hills, and playing into their 
hands to disconcert the traveller. 

I have seen at different times great curiosities of engineer- 
ing, as in travelling over the Ghats in Western India, where 
everything is stupendous and at times even terrific, where 
danger seems perpetual and disaster often inevitable. In 
passing by train from Colombo to Kandy in Ceylon, and 
crossing Sensation Rock, the railway cars actually hang 
over the precipice, so that when you look out of the window 
the track on which you are running is invisible, and you can 
drop an orange plumb down the face of this appalling clift 
on to the tops of the palm-trees, which look like little round 
bushes in the valley down below. From Durban to Pieter- 
maritzburg again, on the line along which, when it was first 
opened, the engine-driver brought out from England refused 
to take his train, declaring it to be too dangerous, but along 
which, nevertheless, the British troops going up to Zululand 
were all safely carried. The South Park line, however, can 
compare with these, and must be accepted as one of the 
acknowledged triumphs of railway enterprise. For much of 
its length the rocks had to be fought inch by inch, and they 
died hard. The result to-day is a very picturesque and 
interesting ride, with a surprise in every mile and beauty all 
the way. 

On the way to the " City of the Carbonates," I heard much 
of Leadville ways and life. That very morning the ener- 
getic police of the town had arrested two young ladies for 
parading the sunflower and the lily too conspicuously. One 
had donned a sunflower for a hat, the other walked along 



38 Shiners and Saints, 

holding a tall lily in her hand. The Leadville youth had 
gathered in disorderly procession behind the aesthetic pair. 
So the police arrested the fair causes of the disturbance. 

I told Oscar Wilde of this a few days later. " Poor sweet 
things ! " said he ; " martyrs in the cause of the Beautiful." 
He was on his way to Salt Lake City at the time, and I told 
him how the Mormon capital was par excellence ''the city 
of sunflowers," and assured him that the poet's feeding on 
'• gilliflowers rare " was not, after all, too violent a stretch of 
imagination, as whole tribes of Indians (and Longfellow 
himself has said that every Indian is a poem, which is very 
nearly the same thing as a poet) feed on the sunflower. The 
Apostle of Art Decoration was delighted. 

"Poor sweet things ! " said he ; "feed on sunflowers ! 
How charming ! If I could only have stayed and dined 
with them ! But how delightful to be able to go back to 
England and say that I have actually been in a country 
where whole tribes of men live on sunflowers I The precious- 
ness of it ! " 

It is a fact, probably new to some of my readers, that the 
wild sunflower is the characteristic weed of Utah, and that 
the seeds of the plant supply the undiscriminating Red Man 
with an oil-cake which may agreeably vary a diet of grass- 
hoppers and rattlesnakes, but has not intrinsically any flavour 
to recommend it. So South Kensington must not rush 
away with the idea that the noble savage who has the Crow 
for his " totem," feeds upon the blossoms of the vegetable 
they worship. It is the prosaic oil-cake that the Pi-ute eats. 

But all I heard got mixed up eventually into a general 
idea that every man in the place wlio had not committed 
a murder was a millionaire, and all those who had not 
lost their lives had lost a fortune. The mines, too, got 
gradually sorted up into two kinds — those that had "five 



An Anti-Vigilance Committee. 39 

million now in sight, sir," or those whose "bottoms had 
fallen out." But one fact that pleased me particularly 
was the " Anti-Vigilance " Committee of Leadville. Every 
one knows that a " Vigilance Committee " consists of a 
certain number of volunteer guardians of the peace, who 
call (with a rope) upon strangers visiting their neighbour- 
hood and offer them the choice of being hanged at once 
for the offences they purpose committing or of going else- 
where to commit them. The strangers, as it transpires in 
the morning, sometimes choose one course and sometimes 
the other. This is all very right and proper, and conduces 
to a general good understanding. But in Leadville, the 
citizens started an afiti-vigilaftce coiiwiittee and so the Vigi- 
lance Committee sent in their resignations to themselves — • 
and accepted them. I do not think I ever heard of a fact 
so appalling in its significance. But the humour of it is 
that the Ant i- Vigilance Committee managed somehow to 
keep the peace in Leadville as it had never been kept before. 

It reminded me of an incident of the Afghan war. A 
certain tribe of hill-men persisted in killing the couriers 
who carried the post from one British camp to the other, 
and the generals were nearly at their wits' end for means of 
communication, when the murderers sent in word offering 
to carry the post themselves — and did so, faithfully ! 

It was in Leadville also that lived the barber who, going 
forth one night, was met by two men who told him peremp- 
torily to take his hands out of his pockets, as they intended 
to take out all the rest. But he had nothing in his pockets 
except two Derringers, so he pulled his hands out and shot 
the two men dead where they stood. Next morning the 
citizens of Leadville placed the barber in a triumphal chair, 
and carried him round the town as a bright example to the 
public, presented him with a gold watch and chain as a 



40 Sinners and Saints, 

testimonial of their esteem for his courage — and then 
escorted him the first stage out of the town, advising him 
never to return. 

But this was in the Leadville of the very remote past — 
1880 or thereabouts — and not in the Carbonate City of the 
present, 1882. The town is now as quiet as such a town 
can be, a wonderfully busy place and a picturesque one. 

And while my companions talked I sat in the wash- 
hand basin and smoked. Why the wash-hand basin? 
Because there was nowhere else to sit. The " smoking-car " 
of this particular train happened to be also the gentlemen's 
lavatory, a commodious snuggery measuring about eight 
feet by five. And as there were only eight smokers on 
board we were not so crowded as we should have been if 
there had been eighteen, and then, you see, we made more 
room still by two of the eight staying away. For the rest, 
two of us sat in the wash-hand basins, one on a stool 
between our legs, another on a stool with his knees against 
the gentlemen opposite, and the balance stood. We were 
an example of tight packing even to the proverbial sardine. 
But I found the water-tap at the edge of the basin an incon- 
venient circumstance. I would venture to suggest to 
American railway companies that for the comfort of 
smokers when sitting in the basins they should place these 
taps a little farther back. 

I suppose I ought to give some mining statistics about 
Leadville. But the very fact that I shall be neglecting an 
obvious duty if I omit all statistics, nearly decides me to 
omit them. The deliberate neglect of an obvious duty is, 
however, a luxury which only the very virtuous can indulge 
in ; and to compromise therefore with the situation, I would 
state that the mining output of Leadville is to-day about 
eleven times as great as it was two years ago, and that five 



Busted Financiers, 41 

years ago there was no output at all. That is to say, this 
town of Leadville, with a population, floating and perma- 
nent together, of some 40,000 souls, and yielding from its 
mines about a thousand dollars per head of the total popu- 
lation, was five years ago a camp of a few hundred 
miners, as a rule so disappointed with the prospect of the 
place that another year of the status quo would have seen 
Leadville deserted. But the secret of the carbonates 
being " ore-iferous " was discovered, and Tabor, like the 
fossil of some antediluvian giant, was gradually revealed by 
the pick of the miner, in all his Plutocratic bulk. A few 
years ago he was selling peanuts at the corner of a street. 
To-day he moves about, king of Denver, with Leadville for 
an appanage. His potentiality in cheques increases yearly 
by another cipher added to the total, and drags at each 
remove a lengthening chain of wealth. Why do men go on 
accumulating money when theyarealready masters of enough ? 
Surely it is better to be rich than a pauper ? But in Colo- 
rado this is not the general opinion. Men there prefer to 
be ruined rather than be merely rich. And the result is 
that you could hardly throw a boot out of the hotel win- 
dow without hitting an ex-millionaire. Not that I would 
advise anybody to go throwing boots promiscuously out of 
hotel windows in Leadville. You would run a good chance 
of following your boots. 

" Do you see that man there, paring his boot with a 
knife ?" asked my companion. 

" Yes," said I, " I see him ; there is a good deal of him 
to see," 

" Well," said he, '' that's So-and-so. He sold so-and-so 
for $400,000 about a year ago. But he busted last Fall 
And if you get into conversation with him, he'll be glad to 
borrow a dollar from you." 



42 Sinners and Saints, 

" Then I shall not get into conversation with him," I 
replied. 

" And do you see that old fellow on the other side, 
leaning against the hitching post, outside the Post 
Office?" 

" Well," said I, " they seem to be mostly leaning against 
the hitching-post, but I presume you mean the gentleman 
in the middle." 

" Yes," was the reply. " That's So-and-so. He struck 
the so-and-so, got $80,000 for his share about six weeks 
ago — and is busted." 

And so on ad infinitum. The problem was a very 
puzzling one to me at first — why do such men make for- 
tunes if they take the first opportunity of throwing them 
away? But the solution, I fancy, is this — that these men 
do not care for money. It is to them what knowledge is 
to the philosopher, a means of acquiring more — worthless in 
itself, but, as leading to larger results, worthy of all eager- 
ness in its pursuit. They do not put Wealth before them- 
selves as an accumulation of current coins, capable of pur- 
chasing everything that makes life materially pleasant. They 
contemplate it merely in the bulk. Much in the same way 
a whaler never thinks of the number of candles in the 
spermaceti into which he has struck a harpoon. He 
looks at his quarry only as a " ten barrel " or a " fifteen 
barrel " whale, as the case may be. He does not content 
himself with the illuminating potentialities of the creature he 
pursues. He is only anxious as to how it will barrel off, and 
the barrels might be pork, or potatoes, or anything else. 
So with the man who goes out mine-hunting. He harpoons 
a lode, lays open so many " millioiis " of ore, sells it to a 
company for a " million " or two, and straightway goes and 
*' busts " for so many " millions.^^ It does not seem to con- 



Philosophy of thick Boots, 43 

cern such a one that a " million " of dollars is so many 
guineas, or roubles, or napoleons, or mohurs, and so forth, 
and that if he goes on to the end of his life, he can never 
achieve more than 7noney. His arithmetic goes mad, and 
he begins computing from the wrong end of the line. Ten 
thousands of dollars make one 50-cent piece, two 50-cent 
pieces make one quarter, five quarters make one nickel, five 
nickels make one cent, and " quite a lot " of cents make 
one fortune. So at it he goes again, trying to foot up a 
satisfactory balance with thousands for units— and " busts " 
before he gets to the end of the sum. 

Leadville itself as I first saw it, ringed in with snow- 
covered hills, a bright sun shining and a slight snow falling, 
remains in my memory as one of the prettiest scenes in my 
experience. In Switzerland even it could hold its own, and 
triumph. I wandered about its streets and into its shops 
and saloons, curious to see some of those men of whom I 
had heard so much ; but whatever may have been their 
exercises with bowie-knife and pistol at a later hour of 
the day, I was never more agreeably disappointed than by 
the manners and bearing of the Leadville miners early in 
the morning. 

There is nothing gives a man so much self-reliance as 
having thick boots on. This fact I have evolved out of my 
own consciousness, for when I was out in the Colonies I often 
tried to analyze a certain sense of " independence " which I 
found taking possession of me. The climate no doubt was 
exceptionally invigorating, and I was a great deal on horse- 
back. But I had been subjected to the same conditions else- 
where without experiencing the same results. And after a 
great deal of severe mental inquiry, I decided that it was — 
my thick boots! And I was right. No man can feel properly 
capable of taking care of himself in slippers. In patent- 



44 Sinners and Saints, 

leather boots he is little better, and in what are called 
*' summer walking-shoes " he still finds himself fastidious 
about puddles, and at a disadvantage with every man he 
meets who does not mind a rough road. But once you be- 
gin to thicken the sole, self-reliance commences to increase, 
and by the time your boots are as soHd as those of a Colorado 
miner you should find yourself his equal in " independence." 
And some of their boots are prodigious. The soles are 
over an inch thick, project in front of the toes perhaps half 
an inch, and form a ledge, as it were, all round the foot. 
What a luxury with such boots it must be to kick a man ! 

The rest of the costume was often in keeping with 
the shoe leather, and in every case where the wearers did 
not belong to the shops and otfices of the town, there was 
a general attention to strength of material and personal 
comfort, at a sacrifice of appearance, which was refreshing 
and unconventional. They are a fine set, indeed, this 
miscellaneous congregation of nationalities which men call 
"Colorado diggers." There is hardly a stupid face among 
them, and certainly not a cowardly one. And then com- 
pare them with the population of their native places — the 
savages of the East of London, the outer barbarians of 
Scandinavia, the degraded peasantry of Western Ireland ! 
The contrast is astonishing. Left in Europe they might 
have guttered along in helpless poverty relieved only by 
intervals of crime, till old age found them in a workhouse. 
But here they can insist on every one pretending to think 
them "as good as himself" (such is, I believe, the formula 
of this preposterous hypocrisy), and, at any rate, may hope 
for sudden wealth. Above all, a man here does not go 
about barefooted, like so many of his family "at home," or 
in ragged shoe-leather, like so many more of them ; but 
stands, and it may even be sleeps, in boots of unimpeach- 



In Leadville, 45 

able solidity. So he goes down the street as if it were his 
own, planting his feet firmly at every step, and, not having 
to trouble himself about the condition of the footway, keeps 
his head erect. Depend upon it, thick boots are one of the 
secrets of " independence " of character. 

But Leadville, this wonderful town that in four years sprang 
up from 300 to 30,000 inhabitants, is not entirely a city of 
miners. On the day that I was there larger numbers than 
usual were in the streets, in consequence of an election then 
in progress holding out promises of unusual entertainment. 
Besides these there is, of course, the permanent population 
of commerce and ordinary business ; and I was struck here, 
as I had not been before since I left Boston, with the natural 
phenomenon of a race reverting to an old type. Boston 
reminded me at times of some old English cathedral city. 
Leadville was like some thriving provincial town. The men 
would not have looked out of place in the street, say, of 
Reading, while the women, in their quiet and somewhat 
old-fashioned style of dressing, reminded me very curiously 
of rural England. Indeed, I do not think my anticipations 
have ever been so completely upset as in Leadville. All the 
way from New York I have been told to wait " till I got to 
Colorado " before I ventured to speak of rough life, and 
Leadville itself was sometimes particularized to me as the 
Ultima Thule of civilization, the vanishing-point of refine- 
ment. 

But not only is Leadville not " rough;" it is even flirting 
with the refinements of life. It has an opera-house, a 
good drive for evening recreation, and a florist's shop. 
There were not many plants in it, it is true, but they were 
nearly all of them of the pleasant old English kinds- 
geraniums, pansies, pinks, and mignonette. Two other 
shops interested me, one stocked with mineral specimens — 



46 Sinners and Saints. 

malachite, agate, amethyst, quartz, blood-stone, onyx, and 
an infinite variety of pieces of ore, gold, silver, lead, iron, 
copper, bismuth, and sulphur — with which pretty settings 
are made, of a quaint grotto-work kind, for clocks and ink- 
stands. The other a naturalist's shop, in which, besides 
fossils, exquisite leaves in stone and petrified tree-fragments, 
I found the commencement of a zoological collection — the 
lynx with its comfortable snow- coat on, and the grey moun- 
tain wolf not less cozily dressed ; squirrels, black and grey, 
" the creatures that sit in the shade of their tails," and the 
^'friends of Hiawatha," with various birds — the sage hen and 
the prairie chicken, the magpie (very like the English bird), 
and the " lark," — a very inadequate substitute indeed for the 
bird that " at Heaven's gate sings," that has been sanctified 
to all time by Shelley, and the idol of the poets of the Old 
World — and heads of large game, horned and antlered, and 
the skin of a " Uon." It is a curious fact that every country 
should thus insist on having a lion. For the real African 
animal himself I entertain only a very qualified respect. For 
some of his substitutes, the panther of Sumatra and the Far 
East, the (now extinct) cat of Australia, and the puma of the 
United States, that respect is even more moderate in degree. 
" The American lion " is, in fact, about as much like the 
original article as the American " muffin " is like the 
seductive but saddening thing from which it takes its name. 
The puma, which is its proper name, is the least imposing 
of all the larger cats. It cannot compare even with the 
jaguar, and would not be recognized by the true lion, or by 
the tiger, as being a kinsman. It is just as true of lions as 
it is of Glenfield starch — " when you ask for it, see that you 
get itJ^ I admit that it is very creditable to America that 
in the great competition of nations she should insist on not 
being left behind even in the matter of lions, but surely it 



Negroes not neeessarily Gentlemen, 47 

would be more becoming to her vast resources and her 
undeniable enterprise if she imported some of the genuine 
breed, instead of, as at present, putting up with such a 
shabby compromise as the puma. 

This tendency to exaggeration in terms has I know been 
very frequently commented upon. But I don't remember 
having heard it suggested that this grandiosity must in the 
long-run have a detrimental effect upon national advance- 
ment. Presuming for instance that an American under- 
stands the real meaning of the word " city," what gross and 
ridiculous notions of self-importance second-class villages 
must acquire by hearing themselves spoken of as " cities." 
Or supposing that one understands the real meaning of the 
word " lady," how comes it that an ill-bred, ill-mannered 
chambermaid is always spoken of as a "lady"? If the name 
is only given in courtesy, why not call them " princesses " at 
once and rescue the nobler word from its present miserable 
degradation ? 

I was in the Chicago Hotel and a coloured porter was 
unstrapi^ing my luggage. I rang the bell for a message boy, 
and on another black servant appearing I gave him a written 
note to take down to the manager. But in that insolent 
manner so very prevalent among the blacker hotel servants 
in America, he said : " That other gentleman will take it 
dotun." " Other gentleman ! " I gasped out in astonish- 
ment ; " there is only one gentleman in this room, and two 
negro servants. And if," I continued, forgetting that I was 
in America, and rising from my chair, " you are not off as 
fast as you can go, I'll — " But the " gentleman " fled so 
precipitately with my message that I got no further. 

Now could anything be more preposterous, than this poor 
creature's attempt to vindicate his right to the flattering title 
conferred upon him by the Boots, and which he in turn con- 



48 Sinners and Saints. 

ferred upon the Barman, until everybody in the hotel, from 
the Manager downwards, was involved in an absurd en- 
tanglement of mutual compliments ? It may of course be 
laughed at as a popular humour. But a stranger like myself 
is perpetually recognizing the mischief which this absurd 
want of moral courage and self-respect in the upper classes 
is working in the country. Nor have Americans any grounds 
whatever to suppose that this sense of "courtesy " is pecu- 
liar to them. It is common to every race in the world, and 
most conspicuous in the lowest. The Kaffirs of Africa and the 
Red Indians address each other with titles almost as fulsome 
as "gentleman," while in India, the home of courtesy and 
good breeding, the natives of the higher castes address the 
very lowest by the title of J/a//^r^y(" great prince"). It 
is accepted by the recipient exactly in the spirit in which it 
is meant. He understands that the higher classes do not 
wish to offend him by calling him by his real name, and his 
Oriental good taste tells him that any intermediate appella- 
tion might be misconstrued. So he calls himself, as he is 
called, by the highest title in the land. There is no danger 
here of any mistake. Every one knows that the misfortune 
of birth or other " circumstances beyond his control " have 
made him a menial. But no one tells him so. He is 
^' Mahaf'GJy 

For myself, I adopted the plan of addressing every negro 
servant as a " Sultan." It was not abusive and sounded well. 
He did not know what it meant any more than he knows 
the meaning of "gentleman," but I saved my self-respect 
by not pretending to put him on an equality with myself. 

At Leadville the hotel servants are white men, and the 
result is civility. But I was in the humour at Leadville to 
be pleased with everything. The day was divine, the land- 
scape enchanting, and the men with their rough riding- 



Under the Pine-trees. 49 



costumes, strange, home-made-looking horses, Mexican 
saddles (which I now for the first time saw in general use) 
and preposterous " stirrups," interested me immensely. Of 
course I went up to a mine, and, of course, went down it. 
And what struck me most during the expedition ? Well, 
the sound of the wind in the pine-trees. 

It was a delightful walk— away up out of the town, with 
its suburbs of mimic pinewood ''chalets" and rough log- 
huts, and the hills all round sloping back froiji the plateau 
so finely, patched and powdered with snow-drifts, fringed ■ 
and crowned with pine-trees, here darkened with a forest.of 
them, there dotted with single trees, and over all, the Swiss 
magic of sunlight and shadow; away up the hill-side, 
through a wilderness of broken bottles and battered meat 
cans, ''a very paradise of rag-pickers, among which are 
scattered the tiny homes of the miners. Women were busy 
chopping wood and bringing in water. Children were 
romping" in parties. But the men, their husbands and 
fathers, were all " up at the mines " at work, invisible, in 
the bowels of the mountain ; keeping the kobolds company, 
and throwing up as they went great hillocks of rubbish behind 
them like som.e gigantic species of mole, or burrowing 
armadillo of the old glyptodon type. And so on, up the 
shingle-strewn hillside thickly studded with charred tree- 
stumps, desolation itself— a veritable graveyard of dead pine- 
trees. Above us, on the crest of the mountain, the forest 
was still standing, and long before we reached them we 
heard the wind-haunted trees of Pan telling their griefs 
to the hills. It is a wonderful music, this of the pine-trees, 
for it has fascinated every people among whom they grow, 
from the bear -goblin haunts of Asiatic Kurdistan through 
the elf-plagued forests of Germany to the spirit-land of the 
Canadian Indians. It is indeed a mystery, this voice in 



50 Sinners and Saints, 

the tree-tops, with all the tones of an organ — the vox-humana 
stop wonderful — and in addition all the sounds of nature, 
from the sonorous diapason of the ocean to the whisperings 
of the reed-beds by the river. When I came upon them in 
Leadville the pines were rehearsing, I think, for a storm that 
was coming. Lower down the slope, the trees were stand- 
ing as quiet as possible, and in the town itself at the bottom 
of the hill the smoke was rising straight. But up here, at the 
top, under the pine-trees, the first act of a tempest was in 
full rehearsal. And all this "time wandering about, I had 
not seen one single living soul. There stood the sheds 
built over the mines. But no one was about. At the door 
of one of them was a cart with its horses. But no driver. 
This extraordinary absence of life gave the hill-top a strange 
solemnity — and though I knew that under my feet the earth 
was alive with human beings, and though every now and 
then a little pipe sticking out of a shed would suddenly 
snort and give about fifty little angry puff's at the rate of a 
thousand a minute, the utter solitude was so fascinating that 
I understood at once why pine-covered mountains, especially 
where mines are worked, should all the world over be such 
favourite sites in legend and ballad for the homes of elfin 
and goblin folk. 

The afternoon was passing before I set out homeward and 
I could hardly get along, so often did I turn round to look 
back at the views behind me. And in front, and on eithei 
side, were the hills, with their hidden hoards of silver and 
lead, watching the town, whence they know the miners will 
some day issue to attack them, and on their slopes lay 
mustered the shattered battalions of their pines, here look- 
ing as if invading the town, into which their skirmishers, 
dotted about among the houses, had already fought their 
way ; there, as if they were retreating up the hillside with 



Back into the Town, ' 51 

their ranks closed against the houses that pursued them, or 
straggling away up the slopes and over the crest in all the 
disorder of defeat. 

And so, down on to the level of the plateau again, v/ith its 
traffic and animation and all the busy life of a hardworking 
town. 



B 2 



52 Sinners and Saints, 



CHAPTER IV. 

FROM LEADVILLE TO SALT LAKE CITY. 

What is the conductor of a Pullman Car ? — Cannibalism fatal to lasting 
friendships — Starving Peter to feed Paul — Connexion between 
Irish cookery and Paruellism — Americans not smokers— In Denver 
— " The Queen City of the Plains"— Over the Rockies- Pride in 
a cow, and what came of it — Sage-brush — Would ostriches pay n 
the West ? — Echo Canon — The Mormons' fortifications — Great 
Salt Lake in sight. 

What is the "conductor" of a Pullman car? Is he a 
private gentleman travelling for his pleasure, a duke in 
disguise, or is he a servant of the company placed on the 
cars to see to the comfort, &c., of the company's customers ? 
I should like to know, for sometimes I have been puzzled 
to find out. The porter is an admirable institution, when 
he is amenable to reason, and I have been fortunate enough 
to find myself often entrusted to perfectly rational specimens. 
The experiences of travellers have, as I know from their 
books, been sometimes very different from mine — ladies, 
especially, complaining — but for myself I consider the Union 
Pacific admirably manned. 

But it is a great misfortune that the company do not run 
hotel cars. I was told that the reason why we were made 
over helplessly to such caterers as those at North Platte and 
Sterling for our food was, that the custom of passengers is 
almost the only source of revenue the " eating-houses " 
along the line can depend upon. Without the custom of 



Cannibalism not Sociable. 53 

passengers they would expire — atrophise — become deceased. 
What I want to know is why they should not expire. I, as a 
traveller, see no reason whatever, no necessity, for their 
being kept alive at a cost of so much suffering to the 
company's customers. Let them decease, or else establish 
a claim to public support. During a long railway journey 
the system is temporarily deranged and appetites are 
irregular, so that some people can not eat when they have 
the opportunity, and when they could eat, do not get it. 
Some day, no doubt, a horrible cannibalic outrage on the 
cars will awaken the directors to the peril of carrying starving 
passengers, and the luxury of the hotel-car will be instituted. 

Not that I could censure the poor men of the South 
Seas or Central Africa for eating each other. There seems 
to me something a trifle admirable in this economy of their 
food. But cannibalism must, in the very nature of it, be deter- 
rent to the formation of lasting friendships between strangers. 
So long as two men look upon each other as possible side 
dishes, there can be no permanent cordiality between them. 
Mutual confidence, the great charm of sincere friendship, 
must be wanting. You could never be altogether at your 
ease in a company which discussed the best stuffing for you. 

Meanwhile, the custom of carrying their own provi- 
sions is increasing in favour among passengers, so that, 
hotel cars or not, these Barmecide " eating-houses '' may 
yet expire from inanition. The waiting (done by girls) is, I 
ought to say, admirable — but then so it was at Sancho 
Panza's supper and at Duke Humphrey's dinner-table. 
And yet the hungry went empty away. 

Between Cheyenne and Ogden the commissariat is dis- 
tinctly better, and the unprovided traveller triumphs 
mildly over the more careful who have carried their own 
provisions. But, striking a balance on the whole journey, 
there is no doubt that the comfort of the trip, some sixty 



54 Sinners and Saints, 

odd hours, from Omaha to Ogden, is materially increased 
by starting with a private stock of food. Bitter herbs with- 
out indigestion is better than a stalled ox with dyspepsia. 

An old Roman epicure gravely expressed his opinion that 
Africa could never be a progressive country, inasmuch as its 
shrimps were so small. And I think I may venture to say 
that if the cookery in the central States does not improve, 
the country must gradually drift backwards into barbarism. 
For there is a most intimate connexion between cookery 
and civilization. 

It is the duty of the historian, and not the task of the 
traveller, to trace national catastrophes to their real causes 
— often to be found concealed under much adventitious 
matter, and when found often surprising from their insignifi- 
cance — and I leave it, therefore, to others to specify the 
particular feature of Irish cookery that tends to create a dis- 
inclination to paying rent. 

That the agitated demeanour of the after-dinner speakers 
during Irish tenant-right meetings was due solely to the 
infuriating and ferocious course of food to which they had 
just submitted, is as certain as that the extraordinary class 
of noises, cavernous and hollow-sounding, produced by their 
applausive audiences was owing to the fact that they had not 
dined at all. In the West of Ireland (where I travelled 
with those "experts in constitutional treason " who were 
then organizing the "No Rent" agitation), the agitators and 
conspirators had no time for long dinners, as the mobs out- 
side were as impatient as hunger, so they sat down, invari- 
ably, to everything at once — mutton, bacon, sausages, 
turkey and ham, with relays of hot potatoes every two 
minutes. While one conspirator was addressing the pea- 
santry, the upper half of his body thrust out of the lower 
half of the window, and only his legs in the dining-room, the 



Potatoes and Parnellism, 55 

rest were eating against time, and as soon as the speaker's 
legs were seen to get up on tiptoe, which they ahvays did 
for the peroration, the next to speak had to rise from his food. 
The result was of course incoherent violence. But a closer 
analysis is required to detect the causes of Irish dislike to 
rent. 

That it would be eventually found that potatoes and 
patriotism have an occult affinity I have no doubt ; but, as 
I have said above, such research more properly belongs to 
the province of the historian. The Spartan stirring his 
black broth with a spear revealed his nature at once, and 
the single act of the Scythians, using their beefsteaks for 
saddles until they wanted to eat them, gives at a glance 
their character to the nation. 

At any rate, it is as old as Athenaeus that " to cookery we 
owe well-ordered States /' for States result from the con- 
gregation of individuals in towns, and towns are the sum of 
agglomerated households, and households, it is notorious, 
never combine except for the sociable consumption of food. 
So long as, in the Dark Ages,. every man cooked for himself, 
or, in the primitive days of cannibalism, helped himself to 
a piece of a raw neighbour, there could be no friendly hearti- 
ness at meals ; but, as soon as cooks appeared, men met 
fearlessly round a common board, towns grew up round the 
dinner-table, and, as Athenaeus remarks, well-ordered States 
grew up round the towns. But if we were to judge of the 
prospects of the people who live, say, about Green River or 
North Platte, by the character of the food (as supphed to 
travellers) the opinion could not be very complimentary or 
encouraging. 

It is a prevalent idea in England that Americans smoke 
prodigiously, even as compared with " the average Britisher." 
Now, in America there is very little smoking. You may 



56 Sinners and Saints, 

perhaps think I am wrong. A great many Americans, I 
allow, buy cigars in the most reckless fashion. But (apart 
from the fact that cigars are not necessarily tobacco) I find 
that as a rule they throw away more than they smoke. 
Speaking roughly, then, I should say so-called " smokers " 
in this country might be divided into three classes : those 
who buy cigars because they cost money ; those who buy 
them because cigars give them a decent excuse for spitting ; 
and those who buy them under the delusion that the friend 
who is with them smokes, and that hospitality or courtesy 
requires that they should Rumour his infatuation. Of the 
trifling residue, the men who smoke because, as they put it, 
"they like it," it is not worth while to speak. Now, one of 
the results of this general aversion to tobacco is that when 
a foreigner addicted to the weed comes over and tries to 
smoke, he is hunted about so, that (as I have often done 
myself) he longs to be in his coffin, if only to get a quiet 
corner for a pipe. In hotels they hunt you down, floor by 
floor, till they get you on to a level with the street, and then 
from room to room till they get you out on to the pavement. 
There is nowhere where you can read and smoke — or write 
and smoke- — or have a quiet chat with a friend over a pipe 
— or in fact smoke at all, in the respectable, civilized. Chris- 
tian sense of the word. Of course, if you like, you can 
" smoke " in the public hall of the hotel. But I would just 
as soon sit out on the kerbstone at the corner of the street 
as among a crowd of men holding cigars in their mouths 
and shouting busiiiess. Out on the kerbstone I should at 
any rate find the saving grace of passing female society. 
In private houses again, smokers are consigned to the 
knuckle end of the domicile and the waste corners thereof, 
as if they snatched a fearful joy from some secret fetish rites, 
or had to go apart into privacy to indulge in a little surrep- 



At the Windsor at Denver. 57 

titious cannibalism. In the streets, friends do not like you 
to smoke when with them, and there are very few public 
conveyances in which tobacco is comfortably possible. 

In trains there is a most conspicuous neglect of smokers. 
I found, for instance, on my journey from New York to 
Chicago, that the only place I could smoke in was the end 
compartment of the fourth car from my own. That is to say, 
let it be as stormy and dark as it may, you have to pass 
from one car to the other half the length of the train, and 
when you do get to " the smoking compartment " you find 
it is only intended to holdyfw passengers. I confess I am 
surprised that these palace cars, otherwise so agreeable, 
should be such hovel cars for smokers. Nor, by the way, 
seeing that the company specially notifies that the passage 
from one car to the other is ** dangerous " while the train is 
in motion, do I think it fair that smokers should be encou- 
raged, and indeed compelled, to run bodily risks in order to 
arrive at their tobacco. Some day no doubt there will be 
Pullman smoking cars, and when there are — I will find 
something else to grumble at. 

Imagine then my astonishment when arriving at the 
Windsor Hotel at Denver, I was shown into a bona-fide 
smoking-room, with cosy chairs, well carpeted, with a writing 
table properly furnished, all the newspapers of the day, and 
a ro aring fire in an open fireplace ! Here at last was civi- 
lization. Here was a room where a man might sit with self- 
respect, and enjoy his pipe over a newspaper, smoke while 
he wrote a letter, foregather over tobacco with a friend in a 
quiet corner ! No noise of loquacious strangers, no mob of 
outsiders to make the room as common as the street, no 
fusillade of expectoration, no stove to desiccate you — above 
all, no coloured " gentleman " to come in and say, " Smoke 
nut 'lard here, sar ! " I was delighted. But my curiosity, 



58 Sinners and Saints. 

at such an aberration into intelligence, led me to confide in 
the manager. 

" How is it," I asked, "you have got what no other hotel 
in America that I have stayed in has got — a comfortable 
smoking-room after the English style ? " 

" Guess^^ said he, " because an English company built this 
hotel!'' 

And I went upstairs, at peace with myself and all English 
companies. 

The first view of Denver is very prepossessing, and further 
acquaintance begets better liking. Indeed on going into the 
streets of " the Queen City of the Plains " I was astonished. 
The buildings are of brick or stone, its roads are good and 
level, and well planted with shade-trees, its suburbs are orderly 
rows of pretty villas, adorned with lawn, and shrubs, and 
flowers. Though one of the very youngest towns of the 
West, it has already an air of solidity and permanence which 
is very striking, while on such a day as I saw it, it is also 
one of the very cleanest and airiest. And the snow-capped 
hills are in sight all round. 

Particularly notable in Denver are its railway station — 
and yet, with all its size, it is found too small for the rapidly 
increasing requirements of the district — and the Tabor 
Opera-House. This is really a beautiful building inside, 
with its lavish upholstery, its charming "ladies' rooms,' 
and smoking-rooms, its variety of handsome stone, its carved 
cherry-wood fittings, its perfectly sumptuous boxes. The 
stage is nearly as large as that at Her Majesty's, quite as 
large as any in New York, while in general appointments 
and in novelty of ornaments, it has very few rivals in all 
Europe. In one point, the beauty of the mise-en-scene from 
the gallery, the Denver house certainly stands quite alone, 
for whereas in all other theatres or opera-houses, " the gods " 



The Queen City of the Plains, 59 

find themselves up in the attics, as it were, with only white- 
washed walls about them, and the sides of the stage shut 
out from view, here they are in handsomely furnished 
galleries, with a clear view of the whole stage over 
the tops of the pagoda-roofed boxes— these curious 
*' pepper-box " roofs being themselves a handsome ornament 
to the scene. By having only a limited number of " stalls " 
on the level, sloping the "pit" up to the "grand tier," and 
making the stage nearly occupy the whole width of the 
house, everybody in the building gets an equally good view 
of the stage. It is indeed an opera-house to be proud of j 
dnd Denver is proud of it. 

There is an idea sometimes mooted that Denver has been 
run on too fast; that it has "seen its day," and may be as 
suddenly deserted as it has been peopled. But there is 
absolutely no chance of this whatever. Colorado is as yet 
only in its cradle, and the older it gets the more substan- 
tial will Denver become, for this city — and very soon it will 
be almost worthy of that name — is the Paris of " the Cen- 
tennial State," the ultimate ambition of the moderately 
successful miner. It is not a place to make your money in 
and leave. But having made your money, to go to and live 
in. For a man or woman must be very fastidious indeed 
who cannot be content to settle down in this, one of the 
prettiest and healthiest towns I have ever visited. Denver 
accordingly is attracting to it, year by year, a larger number of 
that class of citizens upon which alone the permanent prospe- 
rity of a town can depend, the men of moderate capital, satis- 
fied with a fair return from sound investments, who put their 
money into local concerns, and make the place their "home." 
I left Denver in the early morning. Outside the station 
were standing five trains all waiting to be off, and one by 
one their doleful bells began to toll, and one by one they 



6o Sinners and Saints, 

sneaked away. Ours was the last to be off; but at length 
we too got our signal : that is to say, the porter picked up 
the stool which is placed on the platform for the convenience 
of short-legged passengers stepping into the cars — and with- 
out a word we crept off, as if the train was going to a 
funeral, or was ashamed of something it had done. This 
silent, casual departure of trains is a perpetually recurring 
surprise to me. Would it be contrary to republican prin- 
ciples to ring a bell for the warning of passengers ? One 
result, however, of this surreptitious method of making off, 
is that no one is ever left behind. Such is the perversity of 
human nature ! In England people are being perpetually 
"left behind" because they think such a catastrophe to be 
mipossible. In America they are never left behind, because 
they are always certain they will be. 

At first the country threatened a repetition of the old 
prairie, made more dismal than ever by our recent ex- 
periences of the Switzerland of Colorado. But the scene 
gradually picked up a feature here and there as we went 
along, and knowing that we were climbing up " the 
Rockies," we had always present with us the pleasures of 
hope. But if you wish to see the Rocky Mountains so as 
to respect them, do not travel over them in a train. They 
are a fraud, so far as they can be seen from a car window. 
But in minor points of interest they abound. Curious 
boulders, of immense size and wonderful shapes, lie strewn 
about the ground, all water-worn by the torrents of a long- 
ago age, and some of them pierced with holes — the work of 
primeval shell-fish. Beds of river gravel cover the slopes, 
and on every side were abundant vestiges of deluges, them- 
selves antediluvian. And then we came upon isolated cliffs 
of red sandstone, with kranzes running along their faces — 
exactly the same kranzes as the Zulus made such good use 



A Cow's indiscretion, 6i 

of during the war — and showing in their irregular bases how- 
old-world torrents had washed away the clay and softer 
materials that had once no doubt joined these isolated cliffs 
together into a chain of hills, and had left the sandstone 
heart of each hill bare and alone. And so on, up over " the 
Divide " into Wyoming, still a paradise for the rifle and the 
rod, past Cheyenne, a town of many shattered hopes, and 
out into the region of snow again. 

Our engine was perpetually screaming to the cattle to get 
off the track, a series of short, sharp screams that ought to 
have sufficed to have warned even cattle to get out of the 
way. As a rule they recognized the advisability of leaving 
the rails, but one wretched cow, whether she was deaf, or 
whether she was stupid, or whether, like Cole's dog, she 
was too proud to move, I cannot say, but in spite of the 
screams of the engine she held her ground and got the 
worst of the collision. The cow-catcher struck her, and as 
we passed her, the poor beast lay in the blood-mottled 
snow-drift at the bottom of the bank, still breathing, but 
almost dead. As for the train, the cow might have been 
only a fly. 

And so we went on climbing — herds of cattle grazing on 
the slopes, and in the splendid "parks " which lay stretched 
out beneath us wherever the hills stood far apart — with fre- 
quent snow-sheds interrupting all conversation or reading 
with their tunnel-like intervals, till we reached the Red 
Granite Cafion, with great masses of that splendid stone 
fairly mobbing the narrow course of a mountain stream, and 
beyond them snow — snow — snow, stretching away to the 
sky-line without a break. And then Sherman, the highest 
point of the mountains upon the whole line — only some 
8000 feet though, all told — with a half-constructed monu- 
ment to Oakes Ames crowning the summit. When finished, 



62 Sinners and Saints, 

this massive cone of solid granite blocks will be sixty feet 
high. And then on to the Laramie Plains, with some 
wonderful reaches of grazing-ground, and almost fabulous 
records of ranching profits, And here is Laramie itself, 
that will some day be a city, for timber and minerals and 
stock will all combine to enrich it. But to-day it is desolate 
enough, muffled up in winter, with snowbirds in great flights 
flecking the white ground. And so out again into the snow 
wilderness, here and there cattle snuffing about on the 
desolate hill-sides, and snow-sheds — timber-covered ways 
to prevent the snow drifting on to the track — becoming 
more frequent, and the white desolation growing every mile 
more utter. And the moon got up to confuse the horizon 
of land with the background of the sky. And so to sleep, 
with dreams of the Arctic regions, and possibilities, the 
dreariest in the world, of being snowed up on the line. 

Awakening with snow still all round us, and snow falling 
heavily as we reach Green River. And then out into a 
country, prodigiously rich, I was told, in petroleum, but in 
which I could only see that sage-brush was again asserting 
its claims to be seen above the snow-drift, and that wonder- 
ful arrangements in red stone thrust themselves up from the 
hill crests. Terraces reminding me of miniature table- 
mountains such as South Africa affects ; sharply scarped 
pinnacles jutting from the ridges like the Mauritius peaks ; 
plateaux with isolated piles of boulders ; upright blocks 
shaped into the semblance of chimneys ; crests broken into 
battlements, and — most striking mimicry of all snow 
wildernesses — a reproduction in natural rock of the great 
fortress of Deeg, in India. With snow instead of water, the 
imitation of that vast buttressed pile was singularly exact, 
and if there had been only a brazen sun overhead and a 
coppery sky flecked with circling kites, the counterfeit 



Ostrich-farnmig, 63 

would have been perfect. But Deeg would crumble to 
pieces with astonishment if snow were to fall near it, while 
here there was enough to content a polar bear. 

What a pity sage brush — the " three-toothed artemisia " 
of science — has no commercial value. Fortunes would be 
cheap if it had. But I heard at Leadville that a local 
chemist had treated the plant after the manner of cinchona, 
and extracted from its bark a febrifuge with which he was 
about to astonish the medical world and bankrupt quinine. 
That it has a valuable principle in cases of fever, its use by 
the Indians goes a little way to prove, while its medicinal 
properties are very generally vouched for by its being used 
in the West as an application for the cure of toothache, as 
a poultice for swellings, and a lotion ("sage oil") for 
erysipelas, rheumatism, and other ailments. Some day, 
perhaps, a fortune will be made out of it, but at present its 
chief value seems to be as a moral discipline to the settler 
and as covert for the sage-hen. 

Would not the ostrich thrive upon some of these pro- 
digious tracts of unalterable land? Can all America not 
match the African karoo shrub, which the camel-sparrow 
loves ? Ostrich farming has some special recommendations, 
especially for " the sons of gentlemen " and others dis- 
inclined for arduous labour, who have not much of either 
money or brains to start with. Is it not a matter of common 
notoriety that when pursued this fowl buries its head in the 
sand, and thus, of course, falls an easy prey to the intending 
farmer ? If, on the other hand, he does not want the whole 
of the bird, he has only to stand by and pluck its feathers 
out, which, having its head buried, it cannot, of course 
perceive. (These feathers fetch a high price in the market.) 
Supposing, however, that the adventurous emigrant wishes 
to undertake ostrich farming bona fide, he has merely to 



64 Sinners and Saints, 

pull the birds out from the sand, and drive them into an 
enclosure — which he will, of course, have previously made 
— and sit on the gate and watch them lay their eggs. When 
they lay eggs, ostriches — this is also notorious — bury them 
in the sand and desert them, and the gentleman's son on 
the fence can then go and pick them out of the sand. 
(Ostriches' eggs fetch five pounds apiece.) These birds, 
moreover, cost very little for feeding, as they prefer pebbles. 
They can, therefore, be profitably cultivated on the sea 
beach. But I would remind intending farmers that ostriches 
are very nimble on their feet. It is also notorious that they 
have a shrewd way of kicking. A kick from an ostrich will 
break a cab-horse in two. The intending farmer, therefore, 
when he has compelled the foolish bird to bury its head in 
the sand and is plucking out its tail feathers, should stand 
well clear of the legs. This is a practical hint. 

We dined at Evanston, neat-handed abigails, as usual, 
handing round dishes fearfully and wonderfully made out of 
old satchels and seasoned with varnish. There is a Chinese 
quarter here, with its curious congregation of celestial hovels 
all plastered over with, apparently, the labels of tea-chests. 
I should think the Chinese were all self-made men. At any 
rate they do not seem to me to have been made by any one 
who knew how to do it properly. 

However, we had not much time to look at them, for 
cows on the track and one thing and another had made us 
rather late ; so we were very soon off again, the travellers, 
after their hurried and indigestible meal, feeling very much 
like the jumping frog, after he couldn't jump, by reason 
of quail shot. 

The snow had been gradually disappearing, and as we 
approached Echo Canon we found ourselves gliding into 
scenes that in summer are very beautiful indeed, with their 



Echo Canon. 65 



turf and willow -fringed streams and abundant vegetation. 
And then, by gradual instalments of rock, each grander than 
the next, the great canon came upon us. What a superb 
defile this is ! It moves along like some majestic poem in 
a series of incomparable stanzas. There is nothing like it 
in the Himalayas that I know of, nor in the Suleiman range. 
In the Bolan Pass, on the Afghan frontier, there are intervals 
of equal sublimity; and even as a whole it may compare 
with it. But taken all for all — its length (some thirty 
miles), its astonishing diversity of contour, its beauty as well 
as its grandeur — I confess the Echo Canon is one of the 7 
masterpieces of Nature. I can speak (^course only of what 
I have seen. I do not doubt that the Grand Canon in 
Arizona, which is said to throw all the wonders of Colorado 
and the marvels of Yellowstone or Yosemite into the shade, 
would dwarf the highway to Utah, but within my experience 
the Echo is almost incomparable. It would be very diffi- 
cult to convey any idea of this glorious confusion of crags. 
But imagine some vast city of Cyclopean architecture built 
on the crest and face of gigantic cliffs of ruddy stone. 
Imagine, then, that ages of rain had washed away all the 
minor buildings, leaving only the battlements of the city, the 
steeples of its churches, its causeways and buttresses, and 
the stacks of its tallest chimneys still standing where they 
had been built. If you can imagine this, you can imagine 
anything, even Echo Canon — but I must confess that my 
attempt at description does not recall the scene to me in 
the least. 

However, I passed through it and, up on the crest of a 
very awkward cliff for troops to scale under fire, had pointed 
out to me the stone-works which the Mormons built when 
they went out in 1857 to stop the advance of the Federal 
army. 

F 



66 Sinners and Saints. 

And there is no doubt of it that the passage of that defile, 
eveii with such rough defences as the Saints had thrown up, 
would have cost the army very dear. For these stone- 
works, like the Afghans' sunghuvis^ and intended, of course 
for cover against small arms only, were carried along the 
crest of the cliffs for some miles, and each group was con- 
nected with the next by a covered way, while in the bed of 
the stream below, ditches had been dug (some six feet deep 
and twenty wide), right across from cliff to cliff, and a dam 
constructed just beyond the first ditch which in an hour or 
two would have converted the whole canon for a mile or so 
into a level sheet of water. On this dam the Mormon guns 
were masked, and though, of course, the Federal artillery 
would soon have knocked them off into the water, a few 
rounds at such a range and raking the array — clubbed as it 
would probably have been at the ditches — must have proved 
terribly effective. This position, moreover, though it could 
be easily turned by a force diverging to the right before 
it entered the canon, could hardly be turned by one that 
had already entered it. And to attempt to storm those 
heights, with men of the calibre of the Transvaal Dutchmen 
holding them, would have been splendid heroism — or worse. 

And then Weber Canon, with its repetitions of castellated 
cliffs, and its mimicry of buttress and barbican, bastion 
and demilune, tower and turret, and moat and keep, and 
all the other feudal appurtenances of the fortalice that were 
so dear to the author of " Kenilworth," with pine-trees climb- 
ing up the slopes all aslant, and undergrowth that in summer 
is full of charms. The stream has become a river, and fine 
meadows and corn-land lie all along its bank ; large herds 
of cattle and companies of horses graze on the hill slopes, 
and wild life is abundant. Birds are flying about the val- 
ley under the supervision of buzzards that float in the air, half- 



First Glimpse of the Salt Lake, 67 

mountain high, and among the willowed nooks parties of 
moor-hens enjoy life. And so into Ogden. 

Night was closing in fast, and soon the country was in 
darkness. Between Ogden and the City of the Saints lay a 
two hours' gap of dulness, and then on a sudden I saw 
out in front of me a thin white line lying under the hills that 
shut in the valley. 

" That, sir? That is Salt Lake." 



68 Sinners and Saints. 



CHAPTER V. 

THE CITY OF THE HONEY-BEE. 

Zion — Deseret — A City of Two Peoples — "Work " the watchword of 
Mormonism — A few facts to the credit of the Saints — The text of 
the Edmunds Bill — In the Mormon Tabernacle— The closing 
scene of the Conference. 

I HAVE described in my time many cities, both of the east 
and west ; but the City of the Saints puzzles me. It is the 
young rival of Mecca, the Zion of the Mormons, the 
Latter-Day Jerusalem. It is also the City of the Honey-bee, 
" Deseret," and the City of the Sunflower — an encampment 
as of pastoral tribes, the tented capital of some Hyksos, 
" Shepherd Kings " — the rural seat of a modern patriarchal 
democracy; the place of the tabernacle of an ancient 
prophet-ruled Theocracy — the point round which great 
future perplexities for America are gathering fast ; a poli- 
tical storm centre — " a land fresh, as it were, from the hands 
of God;" a beautifnl Goshen of tranquillity in the midst of 
a troublous Egypt — a city of mystery, that seems to the 
ignorant some Alamut or " Vulture's Nest " of an Assassin 
sect; the eyrie of an "Old Man of the Mountains :"— to 
the well-informed the Benares of a sternly pious people ; the 
templed city of an exacting God — a place of pilgrimage in 
the land of promise, the home of the " Lion of Judah," and 
the rallying-point in the last days of the Lost Tribes, the 
Lamanites, the Red Indians — the capital of a Territory in 
which the people, though "Americans," refuse to make 



A City of Two Peoples. 69 

haste to get rich ; to dig out the gold and silver which they 
know abounds in their mountains ; to enter the world's 
markets as competitors in the race of commerce— a people 
content with solid comfort ; that will not tolerate either a 
beggar or a millionaire within their borders, but insist on a 
uniform standard of substantial well-being, and devote all 
the surplus to " building up of Zion," to the emigration 
of the foreign poor and the erection of splendid places 
of ceremonial worship — a Territory in which the towns are 
all filled thick with trees and the air is sweet with the fra- 
grance of fruit and flowers, and the voices of birds and 
bees as if the land was still their wild birthright ; in which 
meadows with herds of cattle and horses are gradually 
overspreading deserts hitherto the wild pashalik of the 
tyrant sage-brush — a land, alternately, of populous cham- 
paign and of desolate sand waste, with, as its capital, a City 
of Two Peoples between whom there is a bitterness of 
animosity, such as, in far-off Persia, even Sunni and Shea 
hardly know. 

Indeed, there are so many sides to Salt Lake City, and 
so much that might be said of each, that I should 
perhaps have shirked this part of my experiences altogether 
were I not conscious of possessing, at any rate, one advan- 
tage over all my " Gentile " predecessors who have written 
of this Mecca of the West. For it was my good fortune to 
be entertained as a guest in the household of a prominent 
Mormon Apostle, a polygamist, and in this way to have had 
opportunities for the frankest conversation with many of 
the leading Mormons of the territory. My candidly avowed 
antipathy to polygamy made no difference anywhere I 
went, for they extended to me the same confidence that 
they would have done to any Gentile who cared to know 
the real facts. 



7o Shmers and Saints. 



In the ordinary way, I should begin by describing the 
City itself. But even then, so subtle is the charm of this 
place — Oriental in its general appearance, English in its 
details — that I should hesitate to attempt description. Its 
quaint disregard of that " fine appearance " which makes 
your "live" towns so commonplace; its extravagance in 
streets condoned by ample shade-trees ; its sluices gurgling 
along by the side- walks j its astonishing quiet; the simple, 
neighbourly Hfe of the citizens— all these, and much more 
combine to invest Salt Lake City with the mystery that 
is in itself a charm. 

Speaking merely as a traveller, and classifying the towns 
which I have seen, I would place the Mormon Zion in the 
same genus as Benares on the Ganges and Shikarpoor in 
Sinde, for it attracts the visitor by interests that are in great 
part intellectual. The mind and eye are captivated 
together. It is a fascination of the imagination as well as 
of the senses. For the capital of Utah is not one of Nature's 
favourites. She has hemmed it in with majestic mountains, 
but they are barren and severe. She has spread the levels 
of a great lake, but its waters are bitter, Marah. There is 
none of the tender grace of English landscape, none of the 
fierce splendour of the tropics ; and yet, in spite of Nature, 
the -valley is already beautiful, and in the years to come 
may be another Palmyra. As yet, however, it is the day of 
small things. Many of the houses are still of adobe, and 
they overlook the trees planted to shade them. Wild flowers 
still grow alongside the track of the tram-cars, and wild birds 
perch to whistle on the telephone wires in the business 
thoroughfares. 

But the future is full of promise, for the prosperity of the 
city is based upon the most solid of all foundations, agricul- 
tural wealth, and it is inhabited by a people whose religion is 



The Gospel of Work, 7 1 

work. For it is a fact about Mormonism which I have not 
yet seen insisted upon, that the first duty it teaches is 
7vork^ and that it inculcates industry as one of the supreme 
virtues. 

The result is that there are no pauper Mormons, for there 
are no idle ones. In the daytime there are no loafers in 
the streets, for every man is afield or at his work, and soon 
after nine at night the whole city seems to be gone to bed. 
A few strangers of course are hanging about the saloon 
doors, but the pervading stillness and the emptiness of the 
streets is dispiriting to rowdyism, and so the Gentile damns 
the place as being " dull." But the truth is that the 
Mormons are too busy during the day for idleness to find 
companionship at night, and too sober in their pleasures for 
gaslight vices to attract them. 

As a natural corollary to this life of hard work, it follows 
that the Mormons are in a large measure indifferent to the 
afiairs of the world outside themselves. Minding their own 
business keeps them from meddling with that of others. 
They are, indeed, taught this from the pulpit. For it is 
the regular formula of the Tabernacle that the people should 
go about their daily work, attend to that, and leave every- 
thing else alone. They are never to forget that they are 
" building up Zion," that their day is coming in good time, 
but that meanwhile they must ivork *'and never bother 
about what other people may be doing." In this way Salt 
Lake City has become a City of Two Peoples, and though 
Mormon and Gentile may be stirred up together sometimes, 
they do not mingle any more than oil and water. 

There are no paupers among the Mormons, and 95 per 
cent, of them live in their own houses on their own land ; 
there is no " caste " of priesthood, such as the world 
supposes, inasmuch as every intelligent man is a priest, and 



72 St7tne7^s and Saints. 



liable at any moment to be called upon to undertake the 
duties of the priests of other churches — but without any 
pay. 

Last winter there was a census taken of the Utah Peni- 
tentiary and the Salt Lake City and county prisons with the 
following result : — In Salt Lake City there are about 75 
Mormons to 25 non-Mormons : in Salt Lake county there 
are about 80 Mormons to 20 non-Mormons. Yet in the city 
prison there were 29 convicts, all non-Mormons ; in the 
county prison there were 6 convicts all non-Mormons. 
The jailer stated that the county convicts for the five years 
past were all anti- Mormons except three I 

In Utah the proportion of Mormons to all others is as 83 
to 17. In the Utah Penitentiary at the date of the census 
there were 5 1 prisoners, only 5 of whom were Mormons, 
and 2 of the 5 were in prison for polygamy, so that the 1 7 
per cent. " outsiders " had 46 convicts in the penitentiary, 
while the Zt^ per cent. Mormons had but 5 ! 

Out of the 200 saloon, billiard, bowling alley and pool- 
table keepers not over a dozen even profess to be Mormons. 
All of the bagnios and other disreputable concerns in the 
territory are run and sustained by non-Mormons. Ninety- 
eight per cent, of the gamblers in Utah are of the same 
element. Ninety-five per cent, of the Utah lawyers are 
Gentiles, and 98 per cent, of all the litigation there is of 
outside growth and promotion. Of the 250 towns and 
villages in Utah, over 200 have no " gaudy sepulchre of 
departed virtue," and these two hundred and odd towns 
are almost exclusively Mormon in population. Of the 
suicides committed in Utah ninety odd per cent, are non- 
Mormon, and of the Utah homicides and infanticides over 
80 per cent, are perpetrated by the 1 7 per cent, of " out- 
siders." 



Mormon Morality, 73 



The arrests made in Salt Lake C 


ty 


from January i, 


1 88 1, to December 8, 1881, were classified as follows : — 


Men .... 




. 782 


Women .... 




. 200 


Boys .... 




. 38 


Total 




. 1020 


Mormons — Men and boys 




163 


Mormons— Women . 




6—169 


Anti-Mormon — Men and boys 




657 


Anti-Mormon — Women . 




194—851 


Total 




. T020 



A number of the Mormon arrests were for chicken, cow, 
and water trespass^ petty larceny, &c. The arrests of non- 
Mormons were 80 per cent, for prostitution, gambling, 
exposing of person, drunkenness, unlawful dram-selling, 
assault and battery, attempt to kill, &c. 

Now, if the 75 per cent. Mormon population of Salt Lake 
City were as lawless and corrupt as the record shows the 
25 per cent. non-Mormons to be, there would have been 
2443 arrests made from their ranks during the year 1881, 
instead of 169 ; while if the 25 percent. non-Mormon popu- 
lation were as law-abiding and moral as the 75 per cent. 
Mormons, instead of 851 non-Mormon arrests during the 
year, there would have been but 56 ! 

These are the kind of statistics that non-Mormons in Salt 
Lake City hate having published. But the world ought to 
know them, if only to put to shame the so-called " Chris- 
tian " community of Utah, that is never tired of libelling, 
personally and even by name, the men and women whom 
Mormons have learned to respect from a lifetime's expe- 
rience of the integrity of their conduct and the purity of 



74 Sinners and Saints. 

their lives — the so-called '^ Christian " community that is 
afraid to hear itself contrasted with these same Mormons, 
lest the shocking balance of crime and immorality against 
themselves should be pubhcly known. But there is no 
appeal from these statistics. They are incontrovertible. 

The time at which I arrived in Utah was a very critical 
one for the Latter- Day Saints. The States, exasperated 
into activity by sectarian agitation — and by the intrigues of 
a few Gentiles resident in Utah who were financially in- 
terested in the transfer of the Territorial Treasury from 
Mormon hands to their own — had just determined, once 
more, to extirpate polygamy, and the final passage of the 
long-dreaded " Edmunds Bill " had marked down Mor- 
mons as a proscribed people, and had indicted the whole 
community for a common offence. 

The following is the text of this remarkable bill : — 
" Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Jvepresentatives 
of the United States of America in Cojigress asseijtbled, That 
section 5352 of the Revised Statutes of the United States 
be, and the same is hereby, amended so as to read as follows, 
namely : 

" Every person who has a husband or wife living who, in 
a territory or other place over which the United States have 
exclusive jurisdiction, hereafter marries another, whether 
married or single, and any man who hereafter simultaneously, 
or on the same day, marries more than one woman, in a 
territory or other place over which the United States have 
exclusive jurisdiction, is guilty of polygamy, and shall be 
punished by a fine of not more than $500 and by imprison- 
ment for a term of not more than five years ; but this sec- 
tion shall not extend to any person by reason of any former 
marriage whose husband or wife by such marriage shall 
have been absent for five successive years, and is not known 



The Edmunds Bill. 75 

to such person to be living, and is believed by such person 
to be dead, nor to any person by reason of any former 
marriage which shall have been dissolved by a valid decree 
of a competent court, nor to any person by reason of any 
former marriage which shall have been pronounced void by 
a valid decree of a competent court, on the ground of 
nullity of the marriage contract. 

" Sec. 2 — That the foregoing provisions shall not affect 
the prosecution or punishment of any offence already com- 
mitted against the section amended by the first section of 
this act. 

" Sec. 3 — That if any mxale person, in a territory or other 
place over which the United States have exclusive jurisdic- 
tion, hereafter cohabits with more than one woman, be shall 
be deemed guilty of a misdemeanour, and on conviction 
thereof, shall be punished by a fine of not more than $300, 
or by imprisonment for not more than six months, or by 
both said punishments, in the discretion of the court. 

" Sec. 4 — That counts for any or all of the offences named 
in sections one and two of this act may be joined in the 
same information or indictment. 

** Sec. 5 — That in any prosecution for bigamy, polygamy, 
or unlawful cohabitation, under any statute of the United 
States, it shall be sufficient cause of challenge to any person 
drawn or summoned as a juryman or talesman, first, that he 
is or has been living in the practice of bigamy, polygamy or 
unlawful cohabitation with more than one woman, or that 
he is or has been guilty of an offence punishable by either 
of the foregoing sections, or by section 5352 of the Revised 
Statutes of the United States, or the Act of July ist, 1862, 
entitled, 'An Act to punish and prevent the practice of 
polygamy in the territories of the United States and other 
places, and disapproving and annulling certain Acts of 



^6 Sinners and Saints. 

the Legislative Assembly of the Territory of Utah;' or 
second, that he believes it right for a man to have more 
than one living and undivorced wife at the same time, or to 
live in the practice of cohabiting with more than one woman ; 
and any person appearing or offered as a juror or talesman, 
and challenged on either of the foregoing grounds, may be 
questioned on his oath as to the existence of any such 
cause of challenge, and other evidence may be introduced 
bearing upon the question raised by such challenge ; and 
this question shall be tried by the court. But as to the first 
ground of challenge before mentioned, the person challenged 
shall not be bound to answer if he shall say upon his oath 
that he declines on the ground that his answer may tend to 
criminate himself; and if he shall answer as to said first 
ground, his answer shall not be given in evidence in any 
criminal prosecution against him for any offence named in 
sections one or three of this Act; but if he declines to 
answer on any ground, he shall be rejected as incompetent. 

"Sec. 6 — That the President is hereby authorized to 
grant amnesty to such classes of offenders, guilty before the 
passage of this act of bigamy, polygamy, or unlawful coha- 
bitation, on such conditions and under such limitations as 
he shall think proper ; but no such amnesty shall have effect 
unless the conditions thereof shall be complied with. 

"Sec. 7 — That the issue of bigamous or polygamous 
marriages, known as Mormon marriages, in cases in which 
such marriages have been solemnized according to the 
ceremonies of the Mormon sect, in any territory of the 
United States, and such issue shall have been born before 
the I St January, a.d. 1883, are hereby legitimated. 

"Sec. 8 — That no polygamist, bigamist, or any person 
cohabiting with more than one woman, and no woman 
cohabiting with any of the persons described as aforesaid in 



The Edmunds Bill, 'j'j 

this section, in any territory or other place over which the 
United States have exclusive jurisdiction, shall be entitled 
to vote at any election held in any such territory or other 
place, or be eligible for election or appointment to or be 
entitled to hold any office or place of public trust, honour, 
or emolument in, under, or for any such territory or place, 
or under the United States. 

" Sec. 9 — That all the registration and election offices of 
every description in the Territory of Utah are hereby 
declared vacant, and each and every duty relating to the 
registration of voters, the conduct of elections, the receiving 
or rejection of votes, and the canvassing and returning of 
the same, and the issuing of certificates or other evidence 
of election in said territory, shall, until other provision be 
made by the Legislative Assembly of said territory as is 
hereinafter by this section provided, be performed under 
the existing laws of the United States and of said territory 
by proper persons, who shall be appointed to execute such 
offices and perform such duties by a board of five persons, 
to be appointed by the President, by and with the advice 
and consent of the Senate, not more than three of whom 
shall be members of one political party, a majority of whom 
shall be a quorum. The canvass and return of all the 
votes at elections in said territory for members of the 
Legislative Assembly thereof shall also be returned to 
said board, which shall canvass all such returns and issue 
certificates of election to those persons who, being eligible 
for such election, shall appear to have been lawfully elected, 
which certificates shall be the only evidence of the right of 
such persons to sit in such Assembly, provided said board 
of five persons shall not exclude any persons otherwise 
eligible to vote from the polls, on account of any opinion 
such person may entertain on the subject of bigamy or 



yS Sinners and Saints, 

polygamy ; nor shall they refuse to count any such vote on 
account of the opinion of the person casting it on the 
subject of bigamy or polygamy; but each house of such 
Assembly, after its organization, shall have power to decide 
upon the elections and qualifications of its members.' 

The day also on which I arrived in Salt Lake City was 
itself a memorable one, for it was the closing day of the 
fifty second annual conference of the Church of Jesus Christ 
of Latter-Day Saints— notable, beyond other conferences, 
as a public expression of the opinions of the leaders of 
the Mormon Church, at a crisis of great importance. The 
whole hierarchy of Utah took part in the proceedings, and it 
was fitly closed by an address from President Taylor himself, 
evoking such a demonstration of fervid and yet dignified 
enthusiasm as I have never seen equalled. 

My telegram to the New York World on that occasion 
may still stand as my description of the scene. 

" Acquainted though I am with displays of Oriental fanati- 
cism and Western revivalism, I set this Mormon enthusiasm 
on one side as being altogether of a different character, for it 
not only astonishes by its fervour, but commands respect by 
its sincere sobriety. The congregation of the Saints assem- 
bled in the Tabernacle, numbering, by my own careful 
computation, eleven thousand odd, and composed in almost 
exactly equal parts of the two sexes, reminded me of the 
Puritan gatherings of the past as I imagined them, and of my 
personal experiences of the Transvaal Boers as I know them. 
There was no rant, no affectation, no straining after thea- 
trical effect. The very simplicity of this great gathering of 
country-folk was striking in the extreme, and significant 
from first to last of a power that should hardly be trifled 
with by sentimental legislation. I have read, I can 
assert, everything of importance that has ever been written 



In the Tabernacle, 79 

about the Mormons, but a single glance at these thou- 
sands of hardy men fresh from their work at the plough 
— at the rough vehicles they had come in, ranged along the 
street leading to the Tabernacle, at their horses, with the 
mud of the fields still upon them — convinced me that I 
knew nothing whatever of this interesting people. Of the 
advice given at this Conference it is easy to speak briefly, 
for all counselled alike. In his opening address, President 
Taylor said, — 

" '- The antagonism we now experience here has always 
existed, but we have also come out of our troubles 
strengthened. I say to you, be calm, for the Lord God 
Omnipotent reignelh, and He will take care of us.' 

" Every succeeding speaker repeated the same advice, and 
the outcome of the five days' Conference may therefore be 
said to have been an exhortation to the Saints ' to pay no 
attention whatever to outside matters, but to live their 
religion, leave the direction of affairs to their priesthood, 
and the result in the hands of God.' 

" Bishops Sharp and Cluff challenged the Union to show 
more conspicuous examples of loyalty than those that 
* brighten the records of Utah ;' Bishop Hatch referred to a 
' Revolutionary ' ancestry ; and Apostle Brigham Young 
(a son of the late President) alluded to the advocacy in 
certain quarters of warlike measures with which he was 
not himself in sympathy. ' I am not,' he said, ' altogether 
belligerent, and am not advocating warlike measures, but I 
do want to advocate our standing true and steadfast all the 
time. If I am to be persecuted for living my religion, 
why, I am to be persecuted. That is all. Dodging the 
issue will not change it. I have read the bill passed to 
injure us, but am satisfied that everything will come out 
all right, that the designs of our enemies will be frus- 



8o Sinners and Saints. 

trated, and confusion will come upon them.' Apostle 
Woodruff reminded the enemies of the Church that it 
* costs a great deal to shed the blood of God's people ;' 
and Apostle Lorenzo Snow said, — 'I do not have any 
fear or trouble about fiery ordeals, but if any do come we 
should all be ready for them.' 

" These and other references to possible trouble seem to 
show that the leaders of the Church consider the state of 
the pubUc mind such as to make these allusions necessary. 
But loyalty to the Constitution was the text of every address, 
and even as regards the Edmunds Bill itself, Apostle Lorenzo 
Snow said, — ' There is something good in it, for it legalizes 
every issue from plural marriages up to January i, 1883. 
No person a few years ago could have ever expected such 
an act of Congress. But it has passed, and been signed 
by the President.' The expressions of the speakers with 
regard to polygamy were at times very explicit. The Pre- 
sident yesterday said, — ' Some of our kind friends have 
suggested that we cast our wives off, but our feelings are 
averse to that. We are bound to them for time and 
eternity — we have covenanted before high heaven to remain 
bound to them. And I declare, in the name of Israel's 
God, that we will keep the covenant, and I ask all to say to 
this Amen.' (Here, like the sound of a great sea- wave 
breaking in a cave, a vast Amen arose from the concourse.) 
' We may have to shelter behind a hedge while the storm 
is passing over, but let us be true to ourselves, our wives, 
our families, and our God, and all will be well.' Again 
to-day he exhorted the Saints 'to keep within the law, 
but at the same time to live their religion and be true 
to their wives, and the principles of their Church.' Several 
other speakers touched upon the fact of plurality being 
an integral doctrine of Mormonism, and not to be interfered 



Amen ! 81 



with without committing an outrage against their religion. 
Retaliation was never suggested, unless the advice given to 
the congregation to make all their purchases at Mormon 
shops may be accepted as a tendency towards Boycotting. 
But the Church was exhorted to stand firm, to allow per- 
secution to run its course, and above all, to be ' manly in 
their fidelity to their wives.' Nor could anything exceed 
the impressiveness of the response which the people gave 
instantaneously to the appeal of their President for the sup- 
port of their voices. The great Tabernacle was filled with 
waves of sound as the * Aniens ' of the congregation burst 
out. The shout of men going into batde was not more 
stirring than the closing words of this memorable conference 
spoken as if by one vast voice : ' Hosannah ! for the Lord 
God Omnipotent reigneth ; He is with us now and will be 
for ever. Amen ! ' *' 



82 Sinners and Saints, 



CHAPTER VI. 

LEGISLATION AGAINST PLURALITY. 

A people under a ban— What the Mormon men think of the Anti- 
Polygamy Bill — And what the Mormon women say of polygamy — 
Puzzling confidences — Practical plurality a very dull affair — But 
theoretically a hedge hog problem— Matrimonial eccentricities — 
The fashionable milliner fatal to plurality — Absurdity of compar- 
ing Moslem polygamy with Mormon plurality — Are the women of 
Utah happy? — Their enthusiasm for Women's Rights. 

Utah, therefore, at the time of my visit was " a pro- 
claimed district" — to use tne Anglo-Indian phrase for 
tracts suspected of infanticide — and every Mormon within 
it had a share in the disgrace thrust upon it. Nor was 
the triumph of the Gentile concealed at the result. The 
Mormons, therefore, were consolidated, in the first instance, 
by the equal pressure of the new law upon all sections of 
the church alike ; in the next by the openly expressed exul- 
tation of the Gentiles. I wrote at the time : " They feel that 
they are under a common ban. The children have read the 
Bill or have had its purport explained to them, and it is well 
known even among the Gentiles how keen the grief was in 
every household when the news that the Bill had passed 
reached Utah. Wives still shed bitter tears over the act of 
Congress which breaks up their happy homes, and robs 
them and their children of the protecting presence of a 
husband and father. The Bill was aimed to put a stop to a 
supposed self-indulgence of the men. But the Mormons 
have never thought of it in this light at all. They see in it 



Under a Ban. 83 



only an attempt to punish their wives. And it is this alleged 
cruelty to their wives and children that has stubborned the 
Mormon men. 

Meanwhile the Mormons affect a contemptuous disre- 
gard of the Commission and all its works. I have spoken 
to many, some of them leaders of local opinion, and every- 
where I find the same amused indifference to it expressed. 
"We have too many real troubles," they say, "to go manu- 
facturing imaginary ones. We must live our religion in the 
present and leave the future to God." 

" But," I would say, " this is not a question of the future. 
All children born after the ist of January, 1883, will be 
illegitim^ate — and in these matters Nature is generally very 
punctual. Now, are you going to break the law or going to 
keep it ? " 

Some would answer "neither," and some "both," but all 
would agree that there was no necessity for worrying them- 
selves about evils which may never befall, and that the 
Edmunds Bill, with all its malignity and cunning, was 
"a stupid blunder," an "impossible" enactment, "an 
absurdity." So the questioning would probably end in 
laughter. 

" But in spite of this expressed indifference to the working 
of the Bill, there can be little doubt that the more re- 
sponsible Mormons have already made up their minds as to 
the course they will take. ' The people ' will follow them 
of course, and forecasting the future, therefore, I anticipate 
that a small minority will break down under the pressure, 
and will return their plural wives to their parents, with such 
provision as they can make for their future support. 

" Of the remainder, that is to say the bulk of the Mor- 
mons, I believe, indeed I feel convinced, that they will simply 
ignore the Bill so long as it ignores them, and that when it 

G 2 



84 Sinners and Saints, 

is put in force against them, they will accept the penalty 
without complaint. In some cases the onus of proving guilt 
will no doubt be made heavier by 'passive resistance,' and 
where the whole family is solid in throwing obstacles in the 
way of espionage, conviction will necessarily be very difficult. 
As a case in point may be cited the instance of the Mormon 
in Salt Lake City, who married a second wife and success- 
fully defied both the law and the public to fix his relation- 
ship to the lady in question and her children. She herself 
was content with saying that her children were honourable in 
birth, and that the wedding-ring on her finger was a fact and 
not a fiction. But who her husband was neither the law nor 
the press could find out for two years, and only then by 
the confession of the sinner himself." 

I was sitting one day with two Mormon ladies, plural 
wives, and the conversation turned upon marriage. 

"But," said I, "now that you have experienced the 
disadvantages of plurality, shall you advise your daughters 
to follow your example ? " 

" No," said both promptly, " I shall not advise them one 
way or the other. They must make their own choice, just 
as I did." 

" Choice, I am afraid, is hardly a choice though. 
Plurality, I fear, is too nearly a religious duty to leave much 
option with girls." 

" Nonsense," said the elder of the two, " I was just as free 
to choose my husband as you were to choose your wife. I 
married for love." 

" And do you really believe," broke in the other, " that 
any woman in the world would marry a man she did not 
like from a sense of religious duty ! " 

" Yes," said I, regardless of the fair speaker's scorn, " I 
thought plenty of women had done so. More than that, 



Preferences f 07^ Polygamy, 85 

thousands have renounced marriage with men whom they 
loved and taken the veil, for Heaven's sake." 

"Very true," was the reply, "a woman may renounce 
marriage and become a nun as a religious duty. But the 
same motive would never have persuaded that woman to 
marry against her inclinations. There is all the difference 
in the world between the two. Any woman will tell you 
that." 

"Then you mean to say," I persisted, "that you and 
your friends consider that you are voluntary agents when 
you go into plurality ? that you do so entirely of your own 
accord and of your own free choice ? " 

" Certainly I do," was the reply. "You may not believe 
us, of course, but that I cannot help. All I can say to you 
is, that if I had the last seven years of my life to live over 
again, I should do exactly what I did seven years ago." 

" And what was that ? " I asked. 

" Refuse to marry a Gentile, to please my friends, and 
marry a polygamist to please myself. I had two offers from 
unmarried men, either of which my family were very anxious 
I should accept. But I did riot care for either. But when 
\ny husband, who had already two wives, proposed to me, 
I accepted him, in spite of my friends' protests. And I 
would marry him again if the choice came over again." 

" Then yours must surely be exceptional cases, for I can- 
not bring myself to believe that those who have been 
* first ' wives would ever consent to their husband's re-mar- 
riage, if their pa^ could be recalled." 

" But I was his first wife," said the elder lady, "and my 
husband's second wife was his first love. And if my past 
were recalled as you put it, I would give my consent just as 
willingly as I did twelve years ago. Perhaps," said she, 
laughing, " you will call mine an ' exceptional ' case too. 



86 Simters and Saints, 

But if you go through the Mormons individually, I am afraid 
you will find that the ' exceptional ' cases are very large." 

*' And how 'about the minority ? " I asked, " the wives 
whose hearts have been broken by plurality ? " 

"Well," was the reply, '* there are plenty of unhappy 
wives. But this is surely not peculiar to polygamy, is it ? 
There are plenty of women who find they have made a mis- 
take. But is it not the same in monogamy ? And yet, though 
our poor women can get divorces with no trouble, and at an 
expense of only ten dollars, and are certain of a competence 
after divorce, and of re-marriage if they choose, they do not 
do it. There is no greater disgrace attaching to divorce 
here than in Europe. Indeed allowances are made for 
the special trials of plurality, and mere unhappiness is in 
itself quite sufficient for a woman to get a divorce. Yet 
divorce is very rare indeed, not one-tenth as common as in 
Massachusetts, for instance." 

" There are bad men amongst us just as there are every- 
where," continued the other lady, " and a bad Mormon is 
the worst man there can be. But we are not the only 
people that have bad husbands among them." 

And so it went on. I was met at every point by assur- 
ances as sincere as tone of voice and language could make 
them appear. Eventually I scrambled out of the subject 
as best I could, covering my retreat with the remark, — 

"Well, my only justification in saying that I do not 
believe you, is this, that if I said I did, 710 one would believe 
mer 

Of this much, however, I am convinced, that whatever may 
have been true thirty years ago— and there has not been a 
single trustworthy book written about Mormonism since 
1862 — it is not true to-day that the Church interferes with 
the domestic relations of the people. When there is a 



Practical Phi7'ality. Z^j 

divorce the Church takes care that the man does not turn 
his wife adrift without provision. But as far as I have been 
able to learn, the authorities do not meddle in any other way 
between man and woman, so long, of course, as neither is a 
scandal to the community. When a scandal arises the 
Church takes prompt notice of it, and the offender, if incor- 
rigible, is next heard of as " apostatizing," or, in other 
words, being turned out of Mormonism as unfit to live in 
it. But once married into polygamy, religion is all-power- 
ful in reconciling women to the sacrifices they have to 
make, precisely, I suppose, in the same way that religion 
reconciles the nun to the sacrifices which her Church accepts 
from her. 

Practical Plurality, then, is a very dull affair. I was disap- 
pointed in it. I had expected to see men with long whips, 
sitting on fences, swearing at their gangs of wives at work in 
the fields. I expected every now and then to hear of drunken 
saints beating seven or eight wives all at once, and perhaps 
even to have seen the unusual spectacle of a house full of 
women and children rushing screaming into the street with one 
intoxicated husband and father in pursuit. Everywhere else 
in the world wife-beating is a pastime more or less indulged 
in coram publico. In London, at any rate, men so arrange 
their chastisements that you can hear the screams from the 
street and see the wife run out of the front door on to the 
pavement. In Salt Lake City therefore, it seemed only 
reasonable to suppose that the amount of the screaming would 
be in proportion to the number of the wives, and that even- 
tually ill-used families would be seen pouring simultaneously 
out of several doors, and scattering over the premises with 
hideous ululation. Where are the aged apostles who have 
so often been described as going about in their swallow-tail 
coats courting each other's daughters ? Where are the " girl- 



88 Sinners and Saints, 

hunting elders " and " ogling bishops " ? Where are the 
families of one man and ten wives to be found taking the 
air together that pictures have so often shown us ? Of course 
there are anomalies, and very objectionable they are. Thus 
one young man has married his half-aunt, another his half- 
sister, and three sisters have wedded the same man ; but 
these instances are all "historical," so to speak, and have 
been so often trotted out by anti-Mormon book-makers, 
that they are hardly worth repeating. Nor does it appear 
to me to be of any force to begin raking to-day into the old 
suspicions as to what Mormons dead and gone used to do. 

What is polygamy like to-day ? That is the question. 
Polygamy to-day, then, has settled down into the most 
matter-of-fact system that is possible for such exceptional 
domestic arrange micnts. In the first place, it is not 
compulsory, and some of the leading saints are monogamous. 
About one-fourth of married Mormons are polygamous, and 
of these something less than three per cent, are under forty 
years of age. The bill of 1862 making polygamy penal 
effected little 01 no difference in the annual average of 
plural marriages, but since 1877 there has been a very 
sensible decrease. 

These facts, then, seem to prove first that polygamy, though 
accepted as a doctrine of the Church, is not generally acted 
upon— and why ? For the best of reasons. Either that the 
men cannot afford to keep up more than one establishment, 
or that they are too happy with one wife to care to marry a 
second, or that the first wife refuses to allow any increase of 
the household — all of which reasons show that polygamy is 
controlled by prudential and domestic considerations, and 
is not the indiscriminate " debauchery " that so many of the 
public believe it to be. It is also evident that the younger 

Mormons are not so active in marrying as the elder men 



A Hedgehog Problem, 89 

were at their age, for ten years ago the proportion of 
polygamous Mormons under forty years of age was much 
greater, which may mean that the inaction of Congress was 
gradually working towards the end which the actio-n of '62 
thwarted. By legislating against polygamy, plural marriages 
increased — 1863 to 1866 being as busy years in the Endow- 
ment House as any that ever preceded them — while by 
letting polygamy severely alone they have been decreasing. 

Polygamy in fact, by the relaxation of the regime, now 
that Brigham Young's personal government has ceased, has 
taken its place as an ordinary civil institution, entailing 
serious responsibilities upon those who choose to enter into 
it, and not carrying with it such promises of temporal 
advantage as at one time were reserved for the plurally 
wedded. There is not the same enthusiasm about it that 
there was, owing probably to the diffusion among the people 
of a better sense of the position of women and of the 
opinions of the world with regard to polygamy. Under the 
administration of President Taylor there has been a marked 
disinclination in the Church to interfere with the domestic 
relations of the community, except, as I have said before, 
when reprimand or punishment seemed to be called for ; and 
it is reasonable therefore to argue that the material decline in 
the number of plural marriages between 1878 and 1882 would 
have continued, the proportion of young enthusiasts have 
gone on decreasing and, as the elders died out, the total of 
polygamists become annually less. Such, I would contend, 
is the reasonable inference from the facts I have given. 

Polygamy, as a problem, reminds me of a hedgehog. 
But as the hedgehog may not be familiar to my American 
readers, let me explain. The hedgehog, then, is a small 
animal with a very elastic skin, closely set all over with 
strong sharp spines. A rural life is all its joy. In habits 



90 Sinners a?id Saints. 

and character it assimilates somewhat to the Mormon 
peasant, being inoffensive, useful, industrious, prolific, and 
largely frugivorous. But when hunted it is otherwise. For 
the hedgehog, if closely pursued, takes hold of its ears with 
its hind paws and, tucking its nose into the middle of its 
stomach, rolls itself into a perfect ball. The spines then 
stand out straight and in every direction equally. Nor, 
thus defended, does the hedgehog shun the public eye. On 
the contrary, it lies out in the full sunlight, in the middle of 
the sidewalk or the dusty high-road, a challenge to the in- 
quisitive attention of every passing dog. And you can no 
more keep a dog from going out of its way to reconnoitre 
the queer-looking object than you can keep needles away 
from loadstones. They do not all behave in the same way 
to it, though. The mutton-headed dogs sit down by it and 
contemplate it vacantly, and go away after a bit in a kind 
of brown study. The silly ones smell it too close, and go off 
down the road in a streak of dust and yelp. The experi- 
enced dogs sniff at it and trot on. "Only that hedgehog 
again ! " they say. The malicious prick their noses and 
lose their temper, and then prick their noses worse and lose 
their tempers more. The puppy barks at it remotely, 
receding every time by the recoil of its own bark, till it 
barks itself backwards into 'the opposite ditch. But 
the hedgehog lies perfectly still, as round and as spiny 
as ever, in the middle of the high-road. All the dogs 
are much the same to it. Some roll it a little one way, 
and some roll it a little the other. It gets dusty or it 
gets wet. But there it lies as inscrutable, puzzling, and 
odious to passing dogs as ever. By-and-by when it is 
dark, and everybody has got tired of poking it and snif^ng 
it and wondering at it, the hedgehog will quietly unroll 
itself and creep away to some secluded spot betwixt orchard 



Ecceiiiric Love Affairs. 91 

and corn-field, and remote from the highways of men and 
their dogs, 

I am particularly led to this moralizing because a 
Mormon has just been enumerating, at my request, some 
of the more extraordinary anomalies that he knows of in 
recent polygamy. I took notes of a few, and they seem 
to me sufficiently puzzling to justify a place in these 
pages. 

A young and very pretty girl, in "the upper ten" of 
Mormonism, married a young man of her own class, but 
stipulated before marriage that he should marry a second 
wife as soon as he could afford to do so. 

A young couple were engaged, but quarrelled, and the 
lover out of pique married another lady. Two years later 
his first love, having refused other offers in the mean time, 
married him as his second wife. 

A man having married a second wife to please himself, 
married a third to please his first. " She was getting old, 
she said, and wanted a younger woman to help her about 
the house." 

A couple about to be married made an agreement 
between themselves that the husband should not marry 
again unless it was one of the relatives of the first wife. 
The ladies selected have refused, and the husband remains 
true to his promise. 

The belle of the settlement, a Gentile, refused monoga- 
mist offers of marriage, and married a Mormon who had 
two wives already. 

A girl, distracted between her love for her suitor and 
her love for her mother, compromised in her affections by 
stipulating that he should marry both her mother and 
herself, which he did. 

A girl, a Gentile, bitterly opposed at first to polygamy, 



92 Sinners and Saints. 

married a polygamist at the solicitation of his first wife, her 
great friend. 

Two girls were great friends, and one of them, getting 
engaged to a man (by no means of prepossessing appear- 
ance), persuaded her friend to get engaged to him too, and 
he married them both on the same day. 

These are enough. Moreover, they are not isolated 
cases, and I believe I am right in saying that I can give a 
second instance, of recent date, of nearly all of them. Nor 
are these anonymous fictions like the " victims " of anti- 
Mormon writers. I have names for each of them. One 
of them tells me she could name " scores *' of the same 
kind. 

It appears to me, therefore, that the women of Utah have 
shaken somewhat the modern theories of the conjugal re- 
lation, and — with all one's innate aversion to a system 
which is capable of such odious abnormalisms — a most 
interesting and baffling problem for study. It is, as I said, 
a regular hedgehog of a problem. If you could only 
catch hold of it by the nose or the tail, you could scrunch 
it up easily. But it has spines all over. It is at once 
provocative and unapproachable. 

I remember once in India giving a tame monkey a lump 
of sugar inside a corked bottle. The monkey was of an 
inquiring kind, and it nearly killed it. Sometimes, in an 
impulse of disgust, it would throw the bottle away, out of 
its own reach, and then be distracted till it was given back 
to it. At others it would sit with a countenance of the 
most intense dejection, contemplating the bottled sugar, 
and then, as' if pulling itself together for another effort at 
solution, would sternly take up the problem afresh, and 
gaze into it. It would tilt it up one way and try to drink 
the sugar through the cork, and then, suddenly reversing 



A Monkey's Puzzle, 93 

it, try to catch it as it fell out at the bottom. Under the 
impression that it could capture it by a surprise it kept 
rapping its teeth against the glass in futile bites, and, 
warming to the pursuit of the revolving lump, used to tie 
itself into regular knots round the bottle. Fits of the most 
ludicrous melancholy would alternate with these spasms of 
furious speculation, and how the matter would have ended 
it is impossible to say. But the monkey one night got 
loose and took the bottle with it. And it has always been 
a delight to me to think that whole forestfuls of monkeys 
have by this time puzzled themselves into fits over the 
great Problem of Bottled Sugar. What profound theories 
those long-tailed philosophers must have evolved ! What 
polemical acrimony that bottle must have provoked ! And 
what a Confucius the original monkey must have become ! 
A single morning with such a Sanhedrim discussing such 
a matter would surely have satiated even a Swift with 
satire. 

Taking then polygamy to be the bottle, and the Gentile to 
be the monkey, it appears to me that the only alternatives 
in solution are these : Either smash the whole thing up 
altogether, or else fall back upon that easy-going old doc- 
trine of wise men, that " morality " is after all a matter of 
mere geography. 

An Oriental legend shows us Allah sitting in casual 
conversation with a man. A cockroach comes along, and 
Allah stamps on it. " What did you do that for ? " asks 
the human, looking at the ruined insect. " Because I am 
God Almighty," was the reply. 

Now, polygamy can be smashed flat if the States choose 
to show their power to do so. But no man who takes a 
part in that demolition must suppose that in so doing he 
will be accepted by the community as rescuing them from 



94 Sinners and Saints. 

degradation. If left alone, polygamy will die out. Mormons 
deny this, but I feel sure that they know they are wrong 
when they deny it, for nothing but a perpetual miracle of 
loaves and fishes will make polygamy and families of forty 
possible when population and food-supply come to talk 
the position over seriously between them. The expense of 
plurality will before long prohibit plurality. 

" The fashionable milliner " is the most formidable adver- 
sary that the system has yet encountered. A twenty-dollar 
bonnet is a staggering argument against it. When women 
were contented with sunshades, and made them for them- 
selves, the husband of many wives could afford to be 
lavish, and to indulge his household in a diversity of head- 
gear. But that old serpent, the fashionable milliner, has 
got over the garden wall, and Lilith^ and Eve are no 
longer content with primitive garments of home manufac- 
ture. 

No. Polygamy will before long be impossible, except 
to the rich ; and in an agricultural community, restricted in 
area, and further restricted by the scarcity of water, there 
can never be many rich men. As it is, the cost of 
plurality was on several occasions referred to by Mormons 
whom I met during my tour, and I know one man who has 
for three years postponed his second marriage, as he does 
not consider that his means justify it ; while I fancy it will 
not be disputed by any one who has inquired into polygamy 
that, as a general rule, prudential considerations control 
the system. Polygamy, then, I sincerely believe, carries 

1 By the way, it is curious that it should be charged against the 
Mormons that they have made Adam a polygamist. It is not a 
Mormon invention at all. For, as is vi^ell known, legends far older 
than Moses' writings declare that Eve married into plurality, and 
that Lilith was the "first wife" of our great progenitor. 



Polygamy and Plurality. 95 

its own antidote with it, and if left alone will rapidly cure 
itself. In the mean time the community that practises it 
does not consider itself " degraded," and those who take 
part in smashing it up must not think it does. 

The Mormons are a peasant people, with many of the 
faults of peasant life, but with many of the best human 
virtues as well. They are conspicuously industrious, honest, 
and sober. 

There is, of course, nothing whatever in common between 
Oriental polygamy and Mormon plurality. The main ob- 
ject, and the main result of the two systems are so widely 
diverse, that it is hardly necessary even to refer to the 
hundred other points of difference which make comparison 
between the two utterly absurd. 

Yet the comparison is often made in order to prove the 
Mormons "degraded," and it is a great pity that such 
superficial and stupid arguments should be used when far 
more effective ones are at hand. Polygamy, though difficult 
to handle, is very vulnerable. The hedgehog, after all, 
will have to unroll some time or another. But to assault 
polygamy because the Mormons are " Turks " or " de- 
bauched Mahometans," or the other things which silly 
people call them, is monstrous. 

The women have complicated the problem by multi- 
plying instances of eccentric "affection." But with it all 
they persist in believing that they have retained a most 
exalted estimate of womanly honour. The men, again, 
have inextricably entangled all recognized ideas of matri- 
monial responsibilities. Yet they have not lost any of the 
manliness which characterizes the pioneers of the West. 

Their social anomalies are deplorable, but they are not 
desperate. Education and the influx of outsiders must in- 
fallibly do their work, and any attempt to rob these men 



96 Sinners and Saints, 

and women of the fruits of their astonishing industry and 
of the peaceful enjoyment of the soil which they have 
conquered for the United States from the most warlike 
tribes among the Indians, and ftom the most malignant 
type of desert, is not only not statesmanship, but it is not 
humanity. 

Are the women of Utah happy ? No ; not in the 
monogamous acceptation of the word "happy." In poly- 
gamy the highest happiness of woman is contentment. 
But on the other hand her greatest unhappiness is only 
discontent. She has not the opportunity on the one hand 
of rising to the raptures of perfect love. On the other, she 
is spared the bitter, killing anguish of " jealousy " and of 
infidelity. 

But contentment is not happiness. It is its negative, 
and often has its source in mere resignation to sorrow. 
It is the lame sister of happiness, the deaf-mute in the 
family of joy. It lives neither in the background nor 
foreground of enjoyment, but always in the middle distance. 
Tender in all things, it never becomes real happiness by 
concentration ; having to fill no deep heart-pools, it trickles 
over vast surfaces. It goes through life smiling but seldom 
laughing. Now, in many philosophies we are taught that 
this same contentment is the perfect form of happiness. 
But humanity is always at war with philosophy. And I for 
one will never believe that perpetual placidity is the highest 
experience of natures which are capable of suffering the 
raptures of joy and of grief. I had rather live humanly, 
travelling alternately over sunlit hills and gloomy valleys, 
than exist philosophically on the level prairies of mono- 
tonous contentment. Holding, then, the opinion that it is 
a nobler life to have sounded the deeps and measured the 
heights of human emotions than to have floated in shallows 



Mormons not Degraded. 97 

continually, I contend that polygamy is wrong in itself and 
a cardinal crime against the possibilities of a v/oman's heart. 
A plural wife can never know the utmost happiness possible 
for a woman. They confess this. And by this confession 
the practice stands damned. 

Physically, Mormorf plurality appears to me to promise 
much of the success which Plato dreamed of, and Utah 
about the best nursery for his soldiers that he could have 
found. Look at the urchins that go clattering about the 
roads, perched two together on the bare backs of horses, 
and only a bit of rope by way of bridle. Look at the rosy, 
demure little girls that will be their wives some day. 
Take note of their fathers' daily lives, healthy outdoor 
work. Go into their homes and see the mothers at their 
work. For in Utah servants get sometimes as much as 
six dollars a week (and their board and lodging as well of 
course), and most households therefore go without this 
expensive luxury. And then as you walk home through one 
of their rural towns along the tree-shaded streets, with water 
purling along beside you as you walk, and the clear breeze 
from the hills blowing the perfume of flowers across your 
path in gusts, with the cottage homes, half smothered in 
blossoming fruit-trees, on either hand, and a perpetual 
succession of gardens, — then, I say, come back and sit 
down, if you can, to call this people "licentious," "impure," 
" degraded." 

The Mormons themselves refuse to believe that poly- 
gamy is the real objection against them, and it will be found 
impossible to convince them that the Edmunds bill is really 
what it purports to be, a crusade against their domestic 
arrangements only. There are some among them who 
thoroughly understand the " political " aspect of the case, 
and are aware that " the reorganization of Utah " would give 

H 



98 Sinners and Saints, 

very enviable pickings to the friends of the Commission. 
Others, have made up their minds that behind this generous 
anti-polygamy sentiment is mean sectarian envy, and that 
this is only one more of those amiable efforts of narrow Chris- 
tians to crush a detested and flourishing sect. 

Jealousy, in fact, is the Mormons' explanation of the 
Edmunds bill. The Gentiles, they say,. are hankering after 
the good things of Utah, and hope by one cry after another 
to persecute the Mormons out of them. But it is far more 
curious that the jealousy of their own sex should be 
suggested by Mormon women as the cause of their partici- 
pation in the clamour against polygamy. Yet so it is ; the 
Gentile women are, they say, "jealous" of a community 
where every woman has a husband ! It is a perplexing 
suggestion, and so thoroughly reverses all rational course of 
argument, that I wish it had never been seriously put for- 
ward. Imagine the ladies of the Eastern States who have 
made themselves conspicuous in this campaign, who have 
fought and bled to rescue their poor sisters from slavery, to 
free them from the grasp of Mormon Bluebeards — imagine, I 
say, these ladies being told by the sisters for whom they are 
fighting, that they ought to be ashamed of themselves for 
being envious of the women in polygamy ! Instead of being 
thanked for helping to strike the fetters of plurality off their 
suffering sisters, they are met with the retort that they ought 
to try being wives and mothers themselves before they come 
worrying those who have tried it and are content ! They 
are requested not to meddle with " what they don't under- 
stand," and are threatened with a counter-crusade against 
the polyandry of Washington, New York, and other cities ! 
But even more staggering is the fact that Mormon women 
base their indignation against their persecuting saviours on 
woman's rights, the very ground upon which those saviours 
have based their crusade ! The advocates of woman's rights 



Women s Rights. 99 

are a very strong party in Utah ; and their publications use 
the very same arguments that strong-minded women have 
made so terrible to newspaper editors in Europe, and 
members of Parliament. Thus the Wof?iarh Exponent — 
with "The Rights of the Women of All Nations" for its 
motto — publishes continually signed letters in which plural 
wives affirm their contentment with their lot, and in one 
of its issues is a leading article, headed " True Charity," and 
signed Mary Ellen Kimball, in which the women of Mor- 
mondom are reminded that they ought to pray for poor 
benighted Mr. Edmunds and all who think like him ! Then 
follows a letter from a Gentile, addressed to "the truthful, 
pure-hearted, intelligent, Christian women " of Utah, and 
after this an article, " Hints on Marriage/' signed " Lillie 
Freeze." But for a sentence or two it might be an article 
by a Gentile in a Gentile " lady's paper," for it speaks of 
" courtship " and " lovers," and has the quotation, " two souls 
with but a single thought, two hearts that beat as one," and 
all the other orthodox pretty things about true love and 
married bliss. Yet the writer is speaking of polygamy ! In 
the middle of this article written "for love's sweet sake," 
and as womanly and pure as ever words written by woman, 
comes this paragraph : — 

" In proportion as the power of evil increases, a disregard 
for the sacred institution of marriage also increases among 
the youth, and contempt for the marriage obligation increases 
among the married until this most sacred relationship will 
be overwhelmed by disunion and strife, and only among 
the despised Latter-Day Saints will the true foundation of 
social happiness and prosperity be found upon the earth ; 
but in order to realize this state we must be guided by prin- 
ciples more perfect than those which have wrought such 
dissolution. God has revealed a plan for estabhshing a new 
order of society which will elevate and benefit all mankind 

H 2 



I oo Sinners and Saints, 

who embrace it. The nations that fight against it are 
working out their own destruction, for their house is built 
upon the sand, and one of the comer-stones in the doomed 
structure is already loosened through their disregard and 
dishonour of the institution of marriage." 

Now what is to be done with women who not only declare 
they are happy in polygamy, but persist in trying to improve 
their monogamous sisters ? How is the missionary going 
to begin, for instance, with Lillie Freeze ? 

If the Commission deals leniently with them, they will 
offer only a passive resistance to the law. But if there is 
any appearance of outrage, General Sherman may have some 
work to do. and it will be work more worthy of disciplined 
troops than mere Indian fighting. There would be abundance 
of that too, but the Mormons are themselves sufficient to 
test the calibre of any troops in the world. For they are 
orderly, solid in their adherence to the Church, and trained 
during their youth and early manhood to a rough, mountain- 
frontier life. They are in fact very superior " Boers," and 
Utah is a very superior Transvaal, strategically. Mormonism 
is not the wind-and-rain inflated pumpkin the world at a 
distance believes ; it is good firm pumpkin to the very core. 
Nor are the Indians a picturesque fiction. They are an 
ugly reality, and under proper guidance a very formidable 
one. In the mean time there is no talk ofwar, andthe 
Sword of Laban is lying quietly in its sheath. For one 
thing, the commission has given no " cause " for war ; for 
another, the present hierarchy of the Church are men of 
peace. 

Such, then, as I view it, is the position in Utah at the 
present time. Mormonism has taken up, in the phrase of 
diplomatic history, " an attitude of observation," and the 
future is " in the hands of the Lord God of Israel." 



lOI 



CHAPTER VII. 

SUA SI BONA NORINT. 

A Special Correspondent's lot — Hypothecated wits — The Daughters 
of Zion — Their modest demeanour — Under the banner of Woman's 
Rights — The discoverer discovered — Turning the tables — "By 
Jove, sir, you shall have mustard with your beefsteak ! " 

It has been my good fortune to see many countries, 
and my ill-luck to have had to maintain, during all my 
travels, an appearance of intelligence. Though I have 
been over much of Europe, over all of India and its 
adjoining countries, Afghanistan, Beloochistan, Burmah, 
and Ceylon, in the north and west and south of Africa, and 
in various out-of-the-way islands in- miscellaneous oceans, I 
have never visited one of them purely " for pleasure." I 
have always been " representing " other people. My eyes 
and ears have been hypothecated, so to speak — my in- 
telligence been in pledge. When I was sent out to watch 
wars, there was a tacit agreement that I should be shot at, 
so that I might let other people know what it felt like. 
When run away with by a camel in a desert that had no 
"other end" to it, I accepted my position simply as 
material for a letter for which my employers had duly paid. 
They tried to drown me in a mill-stream ; that was a good 
half-column. Two Afridis sat down by me when I had 
sprained my knee by my horse falling, and waited for me 
to faint that they might cut my throat. But they overdid 



I02 Sinners and Saints, 



it, for they looked so like vultures that I cojildn'i faint. 
But it made several very harrowing paragraphs. I have 
been sent to sea to get into cyclones in the Bay of Biscay, 
and hurricanes in the Mozambique Channel, that I might 
describe lucidly the sea-going properties of the vessels 
under test. I have been sent to a King to ask him for 
information that it was known beforehand he would not 
give, and commissioned to follow Irish agitators all over 
Ireland, in the hope that I might be able to say more 
about them than they knew themselves. It has been my 
duty to walk about inquisitively after Zulus, and to run 
away judiciously with Zulus after me. Sometimes I have 
taken long shots at Afghans, and sometimes they have 
taken short ones at me. In short, I have been deputed 
at one time and another to do many things which I should 
never have done " for pleasure," and many which, for 
pleasure, I should like to do again. But wherever I have 
been sent I have had to go about, seeing as much as I 
could and asking about all 1 couldn't see, and have be- 
come, professionally, accustomed to collecting evidence, 
sifting it on the spot, and forming my own conclusions. 
In a way, therefore, a Special Correspondent becomes of 
necessity an expert at getting at facts. He finds that 
everything he is commissioned to investigate has at least 
two sides to it, and that many things have two 7'ight sides. 
There are plenty of people always willing to mislead him, 
and he has to pick and choose. He arrives unprejudiced, 
and speaks according to the knowledge he acquires. 
Sometimes he is brought up to the hill with a definite 
commission to curse, but like Balaam, the son of Barak, 
he begins blessing; or he is sent out to bless, and falls to 
cursing. Until he arrives on the spot it is impossible for 
him to say which he will do. But, whatever he does, the 



The Daughters of Zion, 103 

Special Correspondent writes with the responsibility of a 
large public. It is impossible to write flippantly with 
all the world for critics. 

Now, the demeanour of women in Utah, as compared 
with say Brighton or Washington, is modesty itself, and the 
children are just such healthy, pretty, vigorous children as 
one sees in the country, or by the seaside in England — 
and, in my opinion, nowhere else. Utah-born girls, the 
offspring of plural wives, have figures that would make 
Paris envious, and they carry themselves with almost 
Oriental dignity. But remember. Salt Lake City is a city 
of rustics. They do not affect *' gentiHty," and are careful 
to explain at every opportunity that the stranger must not 
be shocked at their homely ways and speech. There is an 
easiness of manner therefore which is unconventional, but 
it is only a blockhead who could mistake this natural 
gaiety of the country for anything other than it is. There 
is nothing, then, so far as I have seen, in the manners of 
Salt Lake City to make me suspect the existence of that 
" licentiousness " of which so much has been written ; but 
there is a great deal on the contrary to convince me of a 
perfectly exceptional reserve and self-respect. I know, too, 
from medical assurance, that Utah has also the practical 
argument of healthy nurseries to oppose to the theories of 
those who attack its domestic relations on physiological 
grounds. 

But the " Woman's Rights " aspect of polygamy is one that 
has never been theorized on at all. It deserves, however, 
special consideration by those who think that they are 
"elevating" Mormon women by trying to suppress poly- 
gamy. It possesses also a general interest for all. For 
the plural wives of Salt Lake City are not by any means 
" waiting for salvation " at the hands of the men and 



I04 Sinners and Saints^ 

women of the East. Unconscious of having fetters on, 
they evince no enthusiasm for their noisy deUverers. 

On the contrary, they consider their interference as a 
slur upon their own intelligence, and an encroachment upon 
those very rights about which monogamist females are 
making so much clamour. They look upon themselves as 
the leaders in the movement for the emancipation of their 
sex, and how, then, can they be expected to accept eman- 
cipation at the hands of those whom they are trying to 
elevate ? Thinking themselves in the van of freedom, are 
they to be grateful for the guidance of stragglers in the 
rear? They laugh at such sympathy, just as the brave 
man might laugh at encouragement from a coward, or 
wealthy landowners at a pauper's exposition of the re- 
sponsibilities of property. Can the deaf, they ask, tell 
musicians anything of the beauty of sounds, or need the 
artist care for the blind man's theory of colour ? 

Indeed, it has been in contemplation to evangelize the 
Eastern States, on this very subject of Woman's Rights ! 
To send out from Utah exponents of the proper place of 
woman in society, and to teach the women of monogamy 
their duties to themselves and to each other! "Woman's 
true status " — I am quoting from their organ — " is that of 
companion to man, but so protected by law that she can 
act in an independent sphere if he abuse his position, and 
render union unendurable." They not only, therefore, 
claim all that women elsewhere claim, but they consider 
marriage the universal birthright of every female. First of 
all, they say, be married^ and then in case of accidents 
have all other " rights " as well. But to start with, every 
woman must have a husband. She is hardly worth calling 
a woman if she is single. Other privileges ought to be 
hers lest marriage should prove disastrous. But in the first 



Discovering the Discoverer, 105 

instance she should claim her right to be a wife. And 
everybody else should insist on that claim being recognized. 
The rest is very important to fall back upon, but union 
with man is her first step towards her proper sphere. 

Now, could any position be imagined more ludicrous 
for the would-be saviours of Utah womanhood than this, 
that the slaves whom they talk of rescuing from their 
degradation should be striving to bring others tip to their 
own standard ? When Stanley was in Central Africa, he 
was often amused and sometimes not a little disgusted to 
find that instead of his discovering the Central Africans, 
the Central Africans insisted on " discovering " him. 
Though he went into villages in order to take notes of the 
savages, and to look at their belongings, the savages used 
to turn the tables on him by discussing him, and taking 
his clothes off to examine the curious colour, as they thought 
it, of his skin. So that what with shaking off his explorers, 
and hunting up the various articles they had abstracted 
for their unscientific scrutiny, his time used to be thoroughly 
wasted, and he used to come away crestfallen, and with the 
humiliating consciousness that it was the savages and not 
he that had gained information and been " improved " by 
his visit. They had " discovered " Stanley, not Stanley 
them. Something very like this will be the fate of those 
who come to Utah thinking that they will be received as 
shining lights from a better world. They will not find the 
women of Utah waiting with outstretched arms to grasp 
the hand that saves them. There will be no stampede of 
down-trodden females. On the contrary, the clarion of 
woman's rights will be sounded, and the intruding " cham- 
pions " of that cause will find themselves attacked with 
their own weapons, and hoisted with their own petards. 
" With the sceptre of woman's rights the daughters of Zion 



1 06 Sinne7^s and Saints, 

will go down as apostles to evangelize the nation. ' Who 
is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, 
clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners ? ' 
The Daughter of Zion ! " 

Mormon wives, then, are emphatically " woman's-rights 
women," a title which is everywhere recognized as indicat- 
ing independence of character and an elevated sense of the 
claims of the sex, and as inferring exceptional freedom in 
action. And I venture to hold the opinion that it is only 
women who are conscious of freedom that can institute such 
movements as this in Utah, and only those who are enthusi- 
astic in the cause, that can carry them on with the courage 
and industry so conspicuous in this community. 

A Governor once went there specially instructed to release 
the women of Utah from their bondage, but he found none 
willing to be released ! The franchise was then clamoured 
for in order to let the women of Utah " fight their oppressors 
at the polls," and the Mormon " tyrants " took the hint to 
give their wives votes, and the first use these misguided 
victims of plurality made of their new possession was to 
protest, 20,000 victims together, against the calumnies 
heaped upon the men of Utah " whom they honoured 
and loved." To-day it is an act of Congress that is to set 
free these worse-than-Indian-suttee-devotees, and whether 
they like it or not they are to be compelled to leave their 
husbands or take the alternative of sending their husbands 
to jail. 

It reminds me of the story, " Sir, you shall have mus- 
tard with your beefsteak." A man sitting in a restaurant 
saw his neighbour eating his steak without mustard, and 
pushed the pot across to him. The stranger bowed his 
acknowledgment of the courtesy and went on eating, but 
without any mustard. But the other man's sense of 



Sua si bona nortnL 107 

propriety was outraged. "Beefsteak without mustard — 
monstrous," said he to himself; and again he pushed the 
condiment towards the stranger. "Thank you, sir," said 
the stranger, but without taking any, continued his meal as 
he preferred it, without mustard. But his well-wisher could 
not stand it any longer. He waited for a minute to see if the 
man would eat his beef in the orthodox manner, and then, 
his sense of the fitness of things overpov/ering him, he 
seized the mustard-pot and dabbing dowh a great splash of 
mustard on to the stranger's plate, burst out with, " By Jove, 
sir, you shall have mustard with your beefsteak ! " 

In the same way the monogamist reformers, having twice 
failed to persuade the wives of Utah to abandon their 
husbands by giving them, facilities for doing so, are now 
going to take their husbands from them by the force of the 
law. " Sua si bona norint " is the excuse of the reformers 
to themselves for their philanthropy, and, like the old 
Inquisitors who burnt their victims to save them from 
heresy, they are going to make women wretched in order 
to make them happy. Says the Woma?C s Exponent : "If 
the women of Utah are slaves, their bonds are loving ones 
and dearly prized. They are to-day in the free and un- 
restricted exercise of more political and social rights than 
are the women of any other part of these United States. 
But they do not choose as a body to court the follies and 
vices which adorn the civilization of other cities, nor to 
barter principles of tried worth for the tinsel of senti- 
mentality or the gratification of passion." 

It is of no use for " Mormon-eaters " to say that this is 
written " under direction," and that the women who write 
in this way are prompted by authority. Nor would 
they say it if they knew personally the women who writ^ 
thus. 



io8 Sinners and Saints, 

Moreover, Mormon-eaters are perpetually denouncing the 
"scandalous freedom " and "independence" extended to 
Mormon women and girls. And the two charges of excessive 
freedom and abject slavery seem to me totally incompatible. 

I myself as a traveller can vouch for this : that one of my 
first impressions of Salt Lake City was this, that there was 
a thoroughly unconventional absence of restraint ; just such 
freedom as one is familiar with in country neighbourhoods, 
where "every one knows every one else," and where the 
formalities of town etiquette are by general consent laid 
aside. And this also I can sincerely say : that I never 
ceased to be struck by the modest decorum of the women 
I meet out of doors. After all, self-respect is the true basis 
of woman's rights. 

This aspect of the polygamy problem deserves, then, I 
think, considerable attention. An Act has been passed to 
compel some 20,000 women to leave their husbands, and 
the world looks upon these women as slaves about to be 
freed from tyrants. Yet they have said and done all that 
could possibly be expected of them, and even more than 
could have been expected, to assure the world that they 
have neither need nor desire for emancipation, as they 
honour their husbands, and prefer polygamy, with all its 
conditions, to the monogamy which brings with it infidelity 
at home and prostitution abroad. Again and again they 
have protested, in petitions to individuals and petitions to 
Congress, that "their bonds are loving ones and dearly 
prized." But the enthusiasm of reformers takes no heed of 
their protests. They are constantly declaring in public 
speeches and by public votes, in books and in newspapers 
— above all, in their daily conduct — that they consider them- 
selves free and happy women, but the zeal of philanthropy 
will not be gainsaid, and so the women of Utah are, all else 



Saved from Themselves, 109 

failing, to be saved from themselves. The "foul blot" 
of a servitude which the serfs aver does not exist is to be 
wiped out by declaring 20,000 wives mistresses, their 
households illegal, and their future children bastards ! 

" By Jove, sir, you shall have mustard with your beef- 
steak!" 



no Sinners and Saints, 



CHAPTER VIII. 

COULD THE MORMONS FIGHT? 

An unfulfilled prophecy — Had Brigham Young been still alive ?— 
The hierarchy of Mormonism — The fighting Apostle and his 
colleagues — Plurality a revelation — Rajpoot infanticide : how it 
was stamped out — Would the Mormons submit to the same pro- 
cess ? — Their fighting capabilities — Boer and Mormon : an 
analogy between the Drakensberg and the Wasatch ranges — 
The Puritan fanaticism of the Saints — Awaiting the fulness of time 
and of prophecy. 

"I SAY, as the Lord lives, we are bound to become a 
sovereign State in the Union or an independent nation 
by ourselves. I am still, and still will be Governor of 
this Territory, to the constant chagrin of my enemies, and 
tiveiity-six years shall not pass away before the Elders of 
this Church will be as much thought of as kings on their 
thrones." These were the words of Brigham Young on the 
last day of August, 1856. And the Bill was passed in 1882. 

Had Brigham Young been alive then, that prophecy 
would assuredly have been fulfilled, for the coincidence of 
recent legislation with the date he fixed, would have suf- 
ficed to convince him that the opportunity for a display of 
the temporal power of his Church which he had foretold, 
had arrived. Once before with similar exactness Brigham 
Young fixed a momentous date. 

He was standing in 1847 upon the site of the Temple, 
when suddenly, as if under a momentary impulse, he turned 



"No Odds!" Ill 



to those who were with him and said, " And now, if they 
will only let us alone for ten years, we will not ask them 
for any odds." 

Exactly ten years later, to the very day, and almost to 
the very hour of the day, the news came of the despatch of 
a Federal army against Salt Lake City. Brigham Young 
called his people together — and what a nation they were 
compared to the fugitive crowd that had stood round him 
in 1847 ! — and simply reminding them of his words uttered 
ten years before, waited for their response. And as if they 
had only one voice among tliem all, the vast assemblage 
shouted, ''No odds." 

And then and there he sent them into Echo Canon — 
and the Federal army knows the rest. 

Had he been alive to-day, that scene would probably 
have been repeated. 

But Brigham Young is not alive. And his mantle has 
not fallen upon any of the Elders of the Church. They 
are men of caution, and the policy of Mormonism to-day is 
to temporize and to wait. All the States are " United " in 
earnest against them. Brigham Young always taught the 
people to reverence prophecy, but he taught them also to 
help to fulfil it. But nowadays Mormons are told to stand 
by and see how the Lord will work for them. And thus 
waiting, the Gentiles are gradually creeping up to them. 
Every year sees new influences at work to destroy the 
isolation of the Church, but the leaders originate no coun- 
teracting influences. Their defences are being sapped, but 
no counter-mines are run. As Gentile vigour grows ag- 
gressive, Mormonism seems to be contracting its frontiers. 
There is no Buonaparte mind to compel obedience. Ma- 
homet is dead, and Ali, "the Lion of Allah," is dead, 
and the Caliphate is now in commission. 



112 Sinners and Saints, 

President Taylor is a self-reliant and courageous man, 
but for a ruler he listens too much to counsel. Though 
not afraid of responsibility, it does not sit upon him as one 
born to the ermine. Brigham Young was a natural king. 
President Taylor only suffices for an interregnum. Yet 
now, if ever, Mormonism needs a master-spirit. Nothing 
demoralizes like inaction. Men begin to look at things 
" from both sides," to compromise with convictions, to 
discredit enthusiasm. This is just what they are doing 
now. At one of the most eventful points of their history, 
they find the voices of the Tabernacle giving forth uncertain 
sounds. Their Urim and Thummim is dim ; the She- 
kinah is flickering ; their oracles stutter. They are told to 
obey the laws. and yet to live their religion. In other 
words, to eat their cake and have it ; to let go and hold 
tight —anything that is contradictory, irreconcilable, and 
impossible. 

Meanwhile, wealth and interests in outside schemes have 
raised up in the Church a body of men of considerable temporal 
influence, who it is generally supposed " outside " are half- 
hearted. The Gentiles lay great stress on this. But no one 
should be deceived as to the real importance of this " half- 
heartedness." In the first place, a single word from President 
Taylor would extinguish the influence of these men politi- 
cally and religously, at once and for ever. A single speech 
in the Tabernacle would reduce them to mere ciphers in 
Mormonism, and the Church would really, therefore, lose 
nothing more by their defection than the men themselves. But 
as a matter of fact they are not half-hearted. I know the 
men whom the outside world refers to personally, and I am 
certain therefore of my ground when I say that Mormonism 
will find them, in any hour of need, ready to throw all their 
temporal influence on to the side of the Church. The 



The Hierarchy of Utah. 1 13 

people need not be apprehensive, for there is no treason in 
their camp. There may be "Trimmers," but was there 
ever a movement that had no Trimmers ? 
The hierarchy in Utah stands as follows : — 
Preside7it — John Taylor. Counsellors to the President — 
Joseph F. Smith, G. Q. Cannon. Apostles —^'-^iox^ Wood- 
ruff, Franklin Richards, C. C. Rich, Brigham Young, Moses 
Thatcher, M. Lyman, J. H. Smith, A. Carrington, Erastus 
Snow, Lorenzo Snow, S. R Teasdel, and J. Grant. Coun- 
sellors to the Apostles— ]o\m W. Young, D. H. Wells. 

Now in the present critical situation of affairs the per- 
sonnel of this governing body is of some interest. President 
Taylor I have already spoken of. He is considered by all 
as a good head during an uneventful period, and that he is 
doing sound, practical work in a general administrative way is 
beyond doubt. But it is his misfortune to come immediately 
after Brigham Young. It is not often in history that an 
Aurungzebe follows an Akbar. But his counsellors, Apos- 
tles Cannon and Joseph Smith, are emphatically strong men. 
The former is a staunch Mormon, and a man of the world 
as well— perhaps the only Mormon who is— while the latter 
is " the fighting Apostle," a man of both brains and courage. 
Had he been ten years older he would probably have been 
President now. Of the remainder the men of conspicuous 
mark are Moses Thatcher, an admirable speaker and an 
able man, Merion Lyman, a very sound thinker and spirited 
in counsel, and D. H. Wells — perhaps the "strongest" unit 
in the whole hierarchy. He has made as much history as 
any man in the Church, and as one of its best soldiers and 
one of its shrewdest heads might have been expected to 
hold a higher rank than he does. He was one of the 
Counsellors of Brigham Young, but on the reconstruction 
of the governing body, accepted the position of Counsellor 



114 Sinners and Saints, 

to the Twelve. These five men, should the contingency 
for any decisive policy arise, will certainly lead the Mor- 
mon Church. 

I was speaking one day to a Mormon, a husband of 
several wives, and was candidly explaining my aversion to 
that co-operative system of matrimony which the world calls 
" polygamy," but which the Saints prefer should be called 
"pluraHty." When I had finished, much to my own satis- 
faction (for I thought I had proved polygamy wrong), my 
companion knocked all my arguments, premises and con- 
clusion together, into a cocked hat, by saying, — 

"You are unprejudiced — I grant that; and you take 
higher ground for your condemnation of us than most do. 
But," said he, " you have never referred to the fact that we 
Mormons believe plurality to be a revelatioji from God. 
But we do believe it, and until that belief is overthrown 
angels from Heaven cannot convince us. You spoke of the 
power and authority of the United States. But what is that 
to the power and authority of God ? The United States 
cannot do more than exterminate us for not abandoning 
plurality. But God can, and will, damn us to all eternity 
if we do abandon it." 

Now what argument but force can avail against such an 
attitude as this ? The better the Mormon, the harder he 
freezes to his religion— and part of his religion is polygamy 
— so important a part, indeed, that the whole future of the 
Saints is based upon it. The " Kingdom of God " is ar- 
ranged with reference to it. The hopes of Mormons of glory 
and happiness in eternity depend upon it, and in this Ufe 
men and women are perpetually exhorted to live up to it. 
It is pure nonsense therefore — so at least it seems to me — 
to request the Mormons to give up plurality, and keep the 
rest. You might just as well cut off all a man's limbs, and 



How Hindoo hifanticide was crushed. 115 

then tell him to get along "like a good and loyal citizen," 
with only a stomach. 

Force of course will avail, in the end, just as it did in 
India when the Government determined to stamp out female 
infanticide among the Rajpoots. There, the procedure was 
from necessity inquisitorial (for the natives of the proscribed 
districts combined to prevent detection), but it was eventually 
effectual. It was simply this. Whenever a family was sus- 
pected of killing its female infants, a special staff of police 
was quartered upon the village in which that family lived, 
at the expense of the village, and maintained a constant per- 
sonal watch over each of the suspected wives during the 
period immediately preceding childbirth. Nothing could 
have been so offensive to native sentiment as such procedure, 
but nothing else was of any use. In the end the suspects 
got wearied of the perpetual tyranny of supervision, and 
their neighbours wearied of paying for the police, and in- 
fanticide as a crime common to a whole community ceased 
after a {^y^ years to exist in India. Now if the worst came 
to the worst, something of the same kind is within the 
resources of the United States. Every polygamous family 
in the Territory might be brought under direct police super- 
vision at the cost of their neighbours, and punishment 
rigidly follow every conviction. This would stamp out 
polygamy in time. 

But it would be a long time, a very long time, and I 
would hesitate to affirm that Mormon endurance and sub- 
mission would be equal to such a severe and such a pro- 
tracted ordeal. There is nothing in their past history that 
leads me to look upon them as a people exceptionally 
tolerant of ill-usage. 

The infanticidal families in India were, it is true, of a 
fighting caste and clan, but the suspected families were 

I 2 



1 1 6 Sinners and Saints, 

only a few hundreds in number. They could not, Hke the 
Mormons, rely upon a strength of twenty-five thousand 
adult males, an admirable strategic position, and the help, if 
necessary, of twenty thousand picked " warriors " from the 
surrounding Indian tribes ; and it is mere waste of words to 
say that the consciousness of strength has often got a great 
deal to do with influencing the action of men who are 
subjected to violence. And I doubt myself, looking to the 
•recent history of England in Africa, and Russia in Central 
Asia, whether the United States, when they come to consider 
Mormon potentialities for resistance, will think it worth 
while to resort to violence in vindication of a sentiment. 
The war between the North and the South is not a case in 
point at all. There was more than a mere '' sentiment " 
went to the bringing on of that war. Remember, I do not 
say that the Mormons entertain the idea of having to fight 
the United States. I only say that they would not be afraid 
to do it, in defence of their religion, if circumstances com- 
pelled it. And I am only arguing from nature when I say 
that those " circumstances " arrive at very difi"erent stages of 
suffering with different individuals. The worm, for instance, 
does not turn till it is trodden on. The grizzly bear turns if 
you sneeze at it. And I am only quoting history when I 
say that thirty thousand determined men, well armed, with 
their base of military supplies at their backs, could defend 
a position of great strategical strength for — well, a very con- 
siderable time against an army only ten times as numerous 
as themselves— especially if that army had to defend a 
thousand miles of communications against unlimited 
Indians. 

It was my privilege when on the editorial staff of the 
Daily Telegj^aph in London to tell the country in the leading 
columns of that paper what I thought of the chances of 



Boers and Mormons ; a Parallel, 117 

success against the Boers of the Transvaal. I said that one 
Boer on his own mountains was worth five British soldiers, 
and that any army that went against those fanatical puritans 
with less than ten to one in numbers, would find "the 
sword of the Lord and of Gideon " too strong for them, and 
the Drakensberg range an impregnable frontier. As an 
Englishman I regret that my words were so miserably ful- 
filled, and England, after sacrificing a great number of men, 
and officers, decided that it was not worth while " for a 
sentiment " to continue the war. 

The points of resemblance between the Mormons and the 
Boers are rather curious. 

The Boers of the Transvaal, though of the same 
stock as the great majority of the inhabitants of British 
Africa, were averse to the forms of government that had 
satisfied the rest. So they migrated, after some popular 
disturbances, and settled in another district where they 
hoped to enjoy the imperiiim in i7nperio on which they had 
set their longings. But British colonies again came up with 
them, and after a fight with the troops, the Boers again 
migrated, and with their long caravans of ox and mule wag- 
gons " trekked " away to the farthest inhabitable corner of 
the continent. Here for a considerable time they enjoyed 
the Hfe they had sought for, established a capital, had their 
own governor, whipped or coaxed the surrounding native 
tribes into docility, and, after a fashion, throve. But yet once 
more the " thin red line " of British possession crept up to 
them, and the Boers, being now at bay, and having nowhere 
else to " trek " to, fought. 

They were not exactly trained soldiers, but merely a ter- 
ritorial militia, accustomed, however, to warfare with native 
tribes, and, by the constant use of the rifle in hunting game, 
capital marksmen. So they declared war against Great 



1 1 8 Sinners and Saints, 

Britain, these three or four thousand Boers, and having 
worked themselves up into the belief that they were fighting 
for their religion, they unsheathed " the sword of the Lord 
and of Gideon," threatened to call in the natives, and holding 
their mountain passes, defied the British troops to force 
them. Nor without success. For every time the troops went 
at them, they beat them, giving chapter and verse out of 
the Bible for each whipping, and eventually concluded their 
extraordinary military operations by an honourable peace, 
and a long proclamation of pious thanksgiving *' to the Lord 
God omnipotent." To-day, therefore. Queen Victoria is 
*' suzerain " of the Transvaal, and the Boers govern them- 
selves by a territorial government. To their neighbours 
they are known as very pious, simple, and stubborn people ; 
very shrewd in making a bargain ; very honest when it is 
made ; a pastoral and agricultural community, with strong 
objections to " Gentiles," who, by the way, are never tired 
of reviling them, especially with regard to alleged eccentri- 
cities in domestic relations. 

Am I not right, then, in saying that the resemblance 
between the Boers and the Mormons is " curious " ? 

When I speak of the Mormons as being prepared to 
accept the worst that the commission under the Edmunds 
bill may do, it should be understood that this readiness to 
suffer does not arise from any misconception of their own- 
strength. The Mormons are thoroughly aware of it ; in- . 
deed, the figures which I have given (25,000 adult males 
and 20,000 Indians) are not accepted by all of them as 
representing their full numbers. They fully understand 
also the capabilities of their position for defence, and are 
not backward to appreciate the advantages which the length 
of the Federal communications would give them for pro- 
tracting a campaign. 



The Children of Ephrairn waiting. 119 

Under the circumstances, therefore, the argument of a 
leading Mormon, that " if the United States really believe 
the people of Utah to be the desperate fanatics they call 
them, any action on their part that tends to exasperate 
such fanatics is foolhardy," may be accepted as quite 
seriously meant. For the Mormons, if bigoted about any- 
thing at all, are so on this point — that they camiot he crushed. 
As the elect of God, specially appointed by Him to prepare 
places of worship and keep up the fires of a religion which / 
is very soon to consume all others, they cannot, they say, / 
be moved until the final fulfilment of prophecy. The Jews 
have still to be gathered together, and " the nations from 
the north country " whose coming, according to the Bible, 
is to be so terrible, are to find the Mormons, " the children 
of Ephraim," ready prepared with such rites and such 
tabernacles that the " sons of Levi," the Jews, can perform 
their old worship, and, thus refreshed, continue their pro- 
gress to the Holy Land. " And their prophets shall come 
in remembrance before the Lord, and they shall smite the 
rocks, and the ice shall flow down at their presence, and a 
highway shall be cast up in the midst of the great deep. 
And they shall come forth, and their enemies shall become 
a prey unto them, and the everlasting hills shall tremble at 
their presence." For this time, these men and women 
among whom I have lived are actually waiting ! 

Of course, we ordinary Christians, whose religion sits 
lightly upon us, cannot, without some effort, understand 
the stern faith with which the Mormons cling to their 
translations of Old Testament prophecy. Nor is it easy to 
credit the fierce earnestness with which, for instance, the 
Saints look forward to the accomplishment of the promise 
thai they shall eventually possess Jackson County, Missouri. 
But if this spirit of intense superstition is not properly 



I20 Sinners and Saints. 

taken into account by those who try to make the Mormons 
alter their beliefs, they run the risk of under-estimarting the 
seriousness of their attempt. If, on the other hand, it is 
properly taken into account, the difficulty of forcing this 
people to abandon their creeds will be at once seen to be 
very grave. 

Except, perhaps, the Kurdish outbreak on the Persian 
frontier some three years ago, there has been no problem 
like the Mormon one presented to the consideration of 
modern Europe. In the case of the Kurds, two nations, 
Turkey and Persia, were within an ace of war, in con- 
sequence of the insurgents pretending that a point of 
religion was involved, and popular fanaticism very nearly 
slipping beyond the control of their respective govern- 
ments. 

When living at a distance from Salt Lake City, it is very 
difficult indeed to recognize the truth of the situation. 
Until I wTnt there I always found that though in a general 
way the obstacles to a speedy settlement were admitted, 
yet that somehow or another there was always the after- 
thought that Mormonism was only an inflated imposture, 
and that it would collapse at the first touch of law. It 
was allowed on all hands that the position was a peculiar 
one, but it was hinted also that it was an absurd one. 
" No doubt," it was argued, " the Mormons are an obstinate 
set of men, but after all they have got common sense. 
When they see that everybody is against them, that poly- 
gamy is contrary to the spirit of the times, that all the 
future of Utah depends upon their abandonment of it, 
that resistance is worse than senseless," and so on, they 
will give in. Let opinion as to the " bigotry " of the 
Mormons or their capacity for mischief be what it might, 
there was always a qualifying addendum to the effect that 



Law versus Conscience, 121 

" nothing would come of all this fuss." The Mormons, in 
fact, were supposed to be " bluffing," and it was taken for 
granted therefore that they had a weak hand. 

But in Salt Lake City it is impossible to speak in this 
way. A Mormon — a man of absolute honesty of speech — 
in conversation on this subject declared to me that 
he could not abandon plurality without apostatizing, and 
rather than do it, he would burn his house and business 
premises down, go away to the Mexicans, die, if necessary. 
Now, that man may any day be put to the very test 
he spoke of. He will have to abandon polygamy, or else, 
if his adversaries are malicious, spend virtually the whole 
of his life in jail. Which will he do ? And what will all 
the others of his way of thinking do ? Will they defy the 
law, or will they try to break it down by its own weight — 
that is to say, load the files with such numbers of cases, 
and fill the prisons with such numbers of convicts that the 
machinery will clog and break down ? The heroic alterna- 
tives of burning down their houses, going off to Mexico, 
and dying will not be offered them. Their choice will 
simply lie between monogamy (or celibacy) and prison, two 
very prosaic things — and one or the other they must 
accept. Such at any rate is the opinion of the world. 

But the Mormons, as I have already shown, do not 
admit this simplicity in the solution at all. From the 
point of view of the law-makers, they allow that the option 
before them is very commonplace. But the law-makers, 
they say, have omitted to take into consideration certain 
facts which complicate the solution. For though, as I 
have said, the majority may be expected to accept such 
qualified martyrdom as is offered, and " await the Lord's 
time," yet there can be no doubt whatever that strict 
Mormons will not acquiesce in the suppression of their 



122 Sinners and Saints, 

doctrines, and among so many who are strict is it reasonable 
to expect that there will be no violent advisers ? Their 
teachers have perpetually taught them, and their leaders 
assured them that prophecy had found its fulfilment in the 
establishment of the Church in Utah. Here, and nowhere 
else, the Saints are to await " the fulness of time," when the 
whole world shall yield obedience to their government, 
and reverence to their religion. The Rocky Mountains, 
and no other, are " the mountains " of Holy Writ where 
" Zion " was to be built ; and they, the Mormons, are the 
remnant of Ephraim that are to welcome and pass on the 
returning Jews. How, then, can the Saints reconcile them- 
selves to another exodus ? Mexico, they say, would welcome 
them ; but if the richest lands in the world, and all the 
privileges they ask for were offered them, they could not 
stultify revelation and prophecy by accepting the offer. 
Moreover, they have been assured times without number 
that they should never be " driven " again, and times without 
number that their enemies " shall not prevail against 
them." To many, to most, this, of course, now points to 
some interposition of Divine Providence in their favour. 
The crisis may seem dangerous, and the opposition to 
them overwhelming. But they are convinced — it is no 
mere matter of opinion with them — that if they are only 
patient under persecution and keep on living their religion, 
the persecution will cease, and the triumph of their faith 
be fulfilled. Europe and America, they believe, are about 
to be involved in terrific disasters. Wars of unprecedented 
magnitude are to be waged, and natural catastrophes, un- 
paralleled in history, are to occur. But, in the midst of all 
this shock of thrones, this convulsion of the elements, Zion 
on the Mountains is to be at peace and in prosperity. It 
will be the one still harbour in all the ocean of troubles, 



An Opportunity for a Bluff. 123 

and to it, as to their final haven, all the elect of all the 
nations are to gather. The prudent, therefore, looking for- 
ward to this apocalypse of general ruin, counsel submission 
to the passing storm, endurance under legal penalties, and 
fidelity to their doctrine. 

But all are not prudent. Every Gethsemane has its Peter. 
And from that memorable garden they draw a lesson. The 
Saviour, they say, meant fighting, but when he saw that 
resistance to such odds as came against him could have only 
ended in the massacre of his disciples, he went to prison. 

That Brigham Young, if alive, would have decided upon 
a military demonstration, the sons of Zeruiah are very ready 
to believe, for they say that, even if the worst were to happen 
and they had eventually to capitulate under unreasonable 
odds, their position would be preferable to that which they 
hold to-day. To-day they lie, the whole community to- 
gether, under the ban of civil disabilities, as a criminal 
class, at the mercy of police — a proscribed people. In the 
future, if compelled to surrender their arms, they would be 
in the position of prisoners on parole, under the honourable 
conditions of a military capitulation. The worst, therefore, 
that could happen would, they say, be better than what is. 

Such, at any rate, they assert, would have been the ar- 
gument of Brigham Young, and Gentiles even confess that 
if the late President were still at the head of the Church 
the temptation for " a great bluff" would be irresistible. 



124 Sinners and Saints, 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE SAINTS AND THE RED MEN. 

Prevalent errors as to the red man — Secret treaties— The policy of the 
Mormons towards Indians — A Christian heathen — Fighting- 
strength of Indians friendly to Mormons. 

I HAPPENED some time ago to repeat, in the presence of 
two " Gentiles," a Mormon's remark that the Indians were 
more friendly towards the Saints than towards other Ameri- 
cans, and the comments of the two gentlemen in question 
exactly illustrated the two errors which I find are usually 
made on this subject. 

One said : " Oh, yes, don't you know the Mormons have 
secret treaties with the Indians ? " 

And the other: *'And much good may they do them; 
these wretched Indians are a half-starved, cricket- eating set, 
not worth a cent." 

Now, I confess that till I came to Utah I had an idea 
that the Utes were always " the Indians " that were meant 
when the friendly relations of the Mormons with the red 
men were referred to. About secret treaties I knew nothing, 
either one way or the other. But while I was there I took 
much pains to arrive at the whole truth— the President of 
the Church having very courteously placed the shelves of 
the Historian's office at my service — and I found no refer- 
ence whatever, even in anti- Mormon literature, to any 
" secret treaty." 



How the Saints treat the Indians, 125 

The Mormons themselves scorn the idea and give the 
following reasons : i. No treaty made with a tribe of Indians 
could be kept secret. 2. There is no necessity for a treaty 
of any kind, as the dislike of the Indians to the United 
States is sufficiently hearty to make them friendly to the 
Territory if it came to a choice between the one or the 
other. 3. The conciliatory policy of the Church towards 
the Indians obviates all necessity for further measures of 
aUiance. 

And this I believe to be the fact. Indeed, I know 
that Mormons can go where Gentiles cannot, and that 
under a Mormon escort, lives are safe in an Indian camp 
that without it would be in great peril. I know further 
that on several occasions (and this is on official record) the 
expostulations of Mormons have prevented Indians from 
raiding — and I think this ought to be remembered when 
sinister constructions are put upon the friendliness of Saints 
towards the Indians. 

From the very first, the Church has inculcated forbear- 
ance and conciliation towards the tribes, and even during 
the exodus from the Missouri River, harassed though they 
sometimes were by Indians, the Mormons, as a point of 
policy, always tried to avert a collision by condoning of- 
fences that were committed, instead of punishing them. If 
the red men came begging round their waggons they gave 
them food, and if they stole— and what Indian will not steal, 
seeing that theft is the road to honour among his people ? — 
the theft was overlooked. Very often, it is true, individual 
Mormons have avenged the loss of a horse or a cow by taking 
a red man's life, but this was always in direct opposition to 
the teachings of the Church, which pointed out that murder 
in the white man was a worse offence than theft in the red, 
and in opposition to the policy of the leaders, who have 



1 26 Sinners aizd Saints, 

always insisted that it was " cheaper to feed than to fight " the 
Indians. In spite, however, of this treatment the tribes 
have again and again compelled the Mormons to take the 
field against them, but as a rule the extent of Mormon re- 
taliation was to catch the plunderers, retake their stolen 
stock, hang the actual murderers (if murder had been com- 
mitted) and let the remainder go after an amicable pow-wow. 
Strict justice was as nearly as possible always adhered to, 
and whenever their word was given, that word was kept 
sacred, even to their own loss. 

Both these things, justice and truth, every Indian under- 
stands. They do not practise them, but they appreciate 
them. Just as among themselves they chivalrously under- 
take the support of the squaws and children of a conquered 
tribe, or as they never steal property that has been placed 
under the charge of one of their own tribe, so when dealing 
with white men, they have learned to expect fairness in 
reprisals and sincerity in speech. When they find them- 
selves cheated, as they nearly always are by " Indian 
agents," they cherish a grudge, and when they suffer an 
unprovoked injury (as when emigrants shoot a passing red 
man just as they would shoot a passing coyote), they wreak 
their barbarous revenge upon the first victims they can find. 
From the Mormons they have always received honest treat- 
ment, comparative fairness in trade and strict truthfulness 
in engagements, while, taking men killed on both sides, it 
is a question whether the red men have not killed more 
Mormons than Mormons have red men. 

During the war of 1865-67, I find, for instance, that all 
the recorded deaths muster eighty-seven on the Indian side 
and seventy-nine on the Mormon, while the latter, besides 
losing great numbers of cattle and horses, having vast 
quantities of produce destroyed and buildings burned down, 



Reasons of the Red Marias Friendliness, 127 

had temporarily to abandon the counties of Piute and 
Sevier, as well as the settlements of Berrysville, Winsor, 
Upper and Lower Kanab, Shuesberg, Springdale and 
Northup, and many places in Kane County, also some 
settlements in Iron County, while the total cost of the 
war was over a million dollars— of which, by the way, the 
Government has not repaid a Territory a cent. During the 
twenty years preceding 1865 there had been numerous 
raids upon Mormon settlements, most of them due to the 
thoughtless barbarity of passing emigrants ; but as a rule, the 
only revenge taken by the Mormons was expostulation, and 
the despatch of missionaries to them with the Bible, and 
medicines and implements of agriculture. 

The result to-day is exactly what Brigham Young foresaw. 
The Indians look upon the Mormons as suffering with 
themselves from the earth-hunger of " Gentiles," and feel a 
community in wrong with them, while they consider them 
different from all other white men in being fair in their acts 
and straightforward in their speech. In 1847 ^ chief of the 
Pottawatomies — then being juggled for the second time 
from a bad reservation to a worse— came into the camp of 
the Mormons — then for the second time flying from one of 
the most awful persecutions that ever disgraced any nation 
— and on leaving spoke as follows — (he spoke good French, 
by the way) : " My Mormon brethren, — We have both 
suffered. We must help one another, and the Great Spirit 
will help us both. You may cut and use all the wood on 
our lands that you wish. You may live on any part of it 
that we are not actually occupying ourselves. Because one 
suffers, and does not deserve it, it is no reason he shall 
suffer always. We may live to see all well yet. However, 
if we do not, our children will. Good-bye." 

Now, it strikes me that a Christian archbishop would fmd 



12 8 Sinners and Saints, 

it hard to alter the Red Indian's speech for the better. It is 
one of the finest instances of untutored Christianity in 
history, and contrasts so strangely with the hideous barbari- 
ties that make the history of Missouri so infamous, that I 
can easily understand the sympathies of Mormons being 
cast in with the Christian heathens they fled to, rather than 
the heathen Christians they fled from. Nor from that day 
to this, have the Mormons forgotten the hint the Pottawa- 
tomie gave them, and on the ground of common suffering 
and by the example of a mutual sympathy have kept up such 
relations with the Indians, even under exasperation, that 
the red man's lodge is now open to the Mormon when it is 
closed to the Gentile. 

What necessity, then, have the Mormons for secret treaties 
with the Indians? •None whatever. The Indians have 
learned by the last half-century's experience that every 
" treaty " made with them has only proved a fraud towards 
their ruin, while during the same period they have learned 
that the word of the Mormons, who nevef make treaties, 
can be relied upon. So if the Saints were now to begin 
making treaties, they would probably fall in the estimation 
of the Indians to the level of the American Government, 
and participate in the suspicion which the latter has so 
industriously worked to secure, and has so thoroughly 
secured. 

The other error commonly made as to the Indians is to 
underestimate their strength. Now the Navajoes alone 
could bring into the field 10,000 fighting men ; and, besides 
these, there are (specially friendly to the Mormons) the 
Flatheads, the Shoshonees, the Blackfeet, the Bannocks, 
part of the Sioux, and a few Apaches, with, of course, the 
Utes of all kinds. The old instinct for the war-path is by 
no means dead, as the recent troubles in the south of 



Importance of the Indians. 129 

Arizona give dismal proof; and a Mormon invitation would 
be quite sufficient to bring all "the Lamanites" together 
into the Wasatch Mountains. 

That any such idea is ever entertained by Mormons I 
heartily repudiate. But I think it worth while to point out, 
that— if the influence of the Mormons on the Indians is 
considered of sufficient importance to base the charge 
of treasonable alliance upon it — it is quite illogical to sneer 
at that influence as making no difference in the case of 
difficulties arising. But as a point of fact, the Mormons 
have no other secret in their relations with the red men 
than that they treat them with consideration, and make 
allowances for their ethical obliquities ; and further, as a 
point of fact also, these same tribes, "the Lamanites" of 
the Book of Mormon, " the Lost Tribes," are in them- 
selves so formidable that under white leadership they would 
make a very serious accession of strength to any public 
enemy that should be able to enlist them. 



1 30 Sinners and Saints, 



CHAPTER X. 

REPRESENTATIVE AND UNREPRESENTATIVE MORMONISM. 

Mormonism and Mormonism — Salt Lake City not representative — The 
miracles of water — How settlements grow-^The town of Logan : 
one of the Wonders of the West — The beauty of the valley — The 
rural simplicity of life— Absence of liquor and crime — A police 
force of one man — Temple mysteries — Illustrations of Mormon 
degradation — Their settlement of the "local option" question. 

Salt Lake City is not the whole of "Mormonism." In 
the Eastern States there is a popular impression that it is. 
But as a matter of fact, it hardly represents Mormonism at 
all. The Gentile is too much there, and Main Street has 
too many saloons. The city is divided into two parties, 
bitterly antagonistic. Newspapers exchange daily abuse, 
and sectarians thump upon their pulpit cushions at each 
other every Sunday. Visitors on their travels, sight-seeing, 
move about the streets in two-horse hacks, staring at the 
houses that they pass as if some monsters lived in them. 
A military camp stands sentry over the town, and soldiers 
slouch about the doors of the bars. 

All this, and a great deal more that is to be seen in 
Salt Lake City, is foreign to the true character of a Mormon 
settlement. Logan, for instance (which I describe later 
on), is characteristic of Mormonism, and nowhere so 
characteristic as in those very features in which it differs 
from Salt Lake City. The Gentile does not take very 



Rural Mormon ism . 131 

kindly to Logan, for there are no saloons to make the 
place a " live town," and no public animosities to give it 
what they call " spirit ;" everybody knows his neighbour, 
and the sight-seeing fiend is unknown. The one and only 
newspaper hums on its way like some self-satisfied bumble 
bee ; the opposition preacher, with a congregation of eight 
women and five men, does not think it worth while, on 
behalf of such a shabby constituency, to appeal to Heaven 
every week for vengeance on the 200,000 who don't 
agree with him and his baker's dozen. There is no pomp 
and circumstance of war to remind the Saints of Federal 
surveillance, no brass cannon on the bench pointing at the 
town (as in Salt Lake City), no ragged uniforms at street 
corners. Everything is Mormon. The biggest shop is the 
Co-operative Store ; the biggest place of worship the 
Tabernacle ; the biggest man the President of the Stake. 
Everybody that meets, "Brothers" or "Sisters" each 
other in the streets, and after nightfall the only man abroad 
is the policeman, who as a rule retires early himself; and 
no one takes precautions against thieves at night. It is a 
very curious study, this well-fed, neighbourly, primitive 
life among orchards and corn-fields, this bees-in-a-clover- 
field life, with every bee bumbling along in its own busy 
way, but all taking their honey back to the same hive. It 
is not a lofty life, nor "ideal" to my mind, but it is 
emphatically ideal, if that word means anything at all, and 
its outcome, where exotic influences are not at work, is 
contentment and immunity from crime, and an Old-World 
simplicity. 

But Logan is not by any means a solitary illustration. 
For the Mormon settlements follow the line of the valleys 
that run north and south, and every one of them, where 
water is abundant, is a Logan in process of development. 

K 2 



132 Sinners and Saints, 

For water is the philosopher's stone ; the fairy All-Good ; 
the First Cause ; the everything that men here strive after 
as the source of all that is desirable. It is silver and gold, 
pearls and rubies, and virtuous women — which are " above 
rubies " — everything in fact that is precious. It spirits up 
Arabian-Nights enchantments, and gives industry a talisman 
to work with. Without it, the sage-brush laughs at man, 
and the horn of the jack-rabbit is exalted against him. 
With it, corn expels the weed, and the long-eared rodent is 
ploughed out of his possession. Without it, greasewood 
and gophers divide the wilderness between them. With it, 
homesteads spring up and gather the orchards around 
them. Without it, the silence of the level desert is broken 
only by the coyote and the lark. With it, comes the 
laughter of running brooks, the hum of busy markets, and 
the cheery voices of the mill-wheels by the stream. With- 
out it, the world seems a dreary failure. With it, it brightens 
into infinite possibilities. No wonder then that men prize 
it, exhaust ingenuity in obtaining it, quarrel about it. I 
wonder they do not worship it. Men have worshipped 
trees, and wind, and the sun, for far less cause. 

Nothing indeed is so striking in all these Mormon 
settlements as the supreme importance of water. It deter- 
mines locations, regulates their proportions, and controls 
their prosperity. Here are thousands of acres barren — 
though I hate using such a word for a country of such 
beautiful wild flowers — because there is no water. There 
is a small nook bursting with farmsteads and trees, 
because there is water. Men buy and sell water- 
claims as if they were mining stock "with millions in 
sight," and appraise each other's estates not by the stock 
that grazes on them, or the harvests gathered from 



Water, the Wonder -worker, 133 

them, but by the water-rights that go with them. Thus, 
a man in Arizona buys a forty-acre lot with a spring 
on it, and he speaks of it as 70,000 acres of "wheat" 
Another has acquired the right of the head-waters of a 
little mountain stream; he is spoken of as owning "the 
finest ranch in the valley." Yet the one has not put a 
plough into the ground, the other has not a single head 
of cattle ! But each possessed the "open sesame" to un- 
told riches, and in a country given over to this new 
form of hydromancy was already accounted wealthy. 

Every stream in Utah might be a Pactolus, every 
pool a Bethesda. To compass, then, this miracle-working 
thing, the first energies of every settlement are directed in 
union. The Church comes forward if necessary to help, 
and every one contributes his labour. At first the stream 
where it leaves the canon, and debouches upon the levels 
of the valley, is run off into canals to north and south and 
west (for all the streams run from the eastern range), and 
from these, like the legs of a centipede, minor channels 
run to each farmstead, and thence again are drawn off in 
numberless small aqueducts to flood the fields. The final 
process is simple enough, for each of the furrows by which 
the water is let in upon the field is in turn dammed up at 
the further end, and each surrounding patch is thus in turn 
submerged. But the settlement expands, and more ground 
is needed. So another canal taps the stream above the 
canon mouth, the main channels again strike off, irrigating 
the section above the levels already in cultivation, and 
overlapping the original area at either end. And every 
time increasing population demands more room, the 
stream is taken off higher and higher up the canon. The 
cost is often prodigious, but necessity cannot stop to 



134 



Sinners and Saints, 



haggle over arithmetic, and the Mormon settlements there- 
fore have developed a system of irrigation which is certainly 
among the wonders of the West. 

" Logan is the chief Mormon settlement in the Cache 
Valley, and is situated about eighty miles to the north of 
Salt Lake City. Population rather over 4000." Such is 
the ordinary formula of the guide book. But if I had to 
describe it in few words I should say this : *' Logan is 
without any parallel, even among the wonders of Western 
America, for rapidity of growth, combined with solid 
prosperity and tranquillity. Population rather over 4000, 
every man owning his own farm. Police force, two men — 
partially occupied in agriculture on their own account. 
N.B.— No police on Sundays, or on meeting evenings, as 
the force are otherwise engaged." 

And writing sincerely I must say that I have seen 
few things in America that have so profoundly impressed 
me as this Mormon settlement of Logan. It is not 
merely that the industry of men and women, penniless 
emigrants a few years ago, has made the valley surpassing 
in its beauty. That it has filled the great levels that stretch 
from mountain to mountain with delightful farmsteads, 
groves of orchard-trees, and the perpetual charm of crops. 
That it has brought down the river from its idleness in the 
canons to busy itself in channels and countless waterways 
with the irrigation and culture of field and garden ; to lend 
its strength to the mills which saw up the pines that grow 
on its native mountains; to grind the corn for the 15,000 
souls that live in the valley, and to help in a hundred ways 
to make men and women and children happy and comfort- 
able, to beautify their homes, and reward their industry. 
All this is on the surface, and can be seen at once by any 
one. 



An Idyll. 135 



But there is much more than mere fertility and beauty 
in Logan and its surroundings, for it is a town without 
crime, a town without drunkenness ! With this knowledge 
one looks again over the wonderful place, and what a new 
significance every feature of the landscape now possesses ! 
The clear streams, perpetually industrious in their loving 
care of lowland and meadow and orchard, and so cheery, 
too, in their incessant work, are a type of the men and 
women themselves ; the placid cornfields lying in bright 
levels about the houses are not more tranquil than the 
lives of the people ; the tree-crowded orchards and stack- 
filled yards are eloquent of universal plenty; the cattle 
loitering to the pasture contented, the foals all running 
about in the roads, while the waggons Vhich their mothers 
are drawing stand at the shop door or field gate, strike the 
new-comer as delightfully significant of a simple country 
life, of mutual confidence, and universal security. 

And yet I had not come there in the humour to be 
pleased, for I was not well. But the spirit of the place 
was too strong for me, and the whole day ran on by itself 
in a veritable idyll. 

A hen conveying her new pride of chickens across 
the road, with a shepherd dog loftily approving the ex- 
pedition in attendance ; a foal looking into a house over a 
doorstep, with the family cat, outraged at the intrusion, 
bristling on the stoop ; two children planting sprigs of 
peach blossoms in one of the roadside streams ; a baby 
peeping through a garden wicket at a turkey-cock which 
was hectoring it on the sidewalk for the benefit of one 
solitary supercilious sparrow — such were the little vignettes 
of pretty nonsense that brightened my first walk in Logan. 
I was alone, so I walked where I pleased ; took notice of 
the wild birds that make themselves as free in the streets 



136 Sinners a7id Saints, 

as if they were away up in the canons ; of the wild flowers 
that still hold their own in the corners of lots, and by the 
roadway ; watched the men and women at their work in 
garden and orchard, the boys driving the waggons to the 
mill and the field, the girls busy with little duties of the 
household, and "the little ones," just as industrious as all 
the rest, playing at irrigation with their mimic canals, three 
inches wide, old fruit-cans for buckets, and posies stuck 
into the mud for orchards. I stopped to talk to a man 
here and a woman there ; helped to fetch down a kitten 
out of an apple-tree, and, at the request of a boy, some 
ten years old, I should say, opened a gate to let the team 
he was driving, or rather being walked along with, go into 
the lot. 

It was a beautiful day, and all the trees were either in 
full bloom or bright young leaf; and the conviction 
gradually grew upon me that I had never, out of England, 
seen a place so simple, so neighbourly, so quiet. 

Later on I was driven through the town to the Terpple. 
The wide roads are all avenued with trees, and behind trees, 
each in its own garden, or orchard, or lot of farm-land, 
stands a ceaseless succession of cottage homes. Here and 
there a "villa," but the great majority "cottages." Not the 
dog-kennels in which the Irish peasantry are content to 
grovel through life so long as they need not work and can 
have their whisky. Not the hovels which in some parts of 
rural England house the farm labourer and his unkempt 
urchins. But cleanly, comfortable homes, some of adobe, 
some of wood, with porticos and verandahs and other orna- 
ments, six or eight or even ten rooms, with barns behind 
for the cow and the horse and the poultry, bird-cages at the 
doors, clean white curtains at the windows, and neatly 
bedded flowers in the garden-plots. Hundred after hundred, 



A very degraded Serf. 137 

each in its own lot of amply watered ground, we passed the 
homes of these Mormon farmers, and it was a wonderful 
thing to me — so fresh from the old country, with its elegance 
and its squalor side by side; so lately from the "live" 
cities of Colorado, with their murrain of " busted " million- 
aires and hollow shells of speculative prosperity — this great 
township of an equal prosperity and a universal comfort. 
Every man I met in the street or saw in the fields owned 
the house w^hich he lived in, and the ground that his rail- 
ings bounded. Moreover they were his by right of purchase, 
the earnings of the work of his own two hands. No wonder, 
then, they demean themselves like men. 

I was driving with the President of the " stake " — such is 
the name of the Church for the sub-divisions of its Territory 
— and the chief official, therefore, of Logan, when, in a 
narrow part of the road we met a down-trodden Mormon 
serf driving a loaded waggon in the opposite direction. 
The President pulled a little to one side, motioning the man 
to drive past. But the roadway thus left for him was rather 
rough and this degraded slave of the Church, knowing the 
rule of the road (that a loaded waggon has the right of way 
against all other vehicles), calmly pointed with his whip- 
handle to the side of the road, and said to his President. 
" You drive there'' And the President did so, whereat the 
do^Ti-trodden one proceeded on his way in the best of the 
road. 

Now this may be accepted as an instance of that ab- 
ject servitude which, according to anti-Mormons, charac- 
terizes the followers of Mormonism. As another illustration 
of the same awe-stricken subjection may be here noted the 
fact, that whenever the President slackened pace, passers- 
by, men and women, would come over to us, and shaking 
hands with the President, exchange small items of domestic, 



138 Sinners and Saints, 

neighbourly chat — the health of the family, convalescence 
of a cow, and, speaking generally, discuss Tommy's measles. 
Now, women would hardly waste a despofs time with intelli- 
gence of an infant's third tooth, or a man expatiate on the 
miraculous recovery of a calf from a surfeit of damp lucerne. 
I chanced also one day to be vs^ith an authority when 
a man called in to apologize for not having repaid his 
emigration money; and to me the incident was specially 
interesting on this account, that very few writers on the 
Mormons have escaped charging the Church with acting 
dishonestly and usuriously towards its emigrants. I have 
read repeatedly that the emigrants, being once in debt, are 
never able to get out of debt ; that the Church prefers they 
should not; that the indebtedness is held in terrorem over 
them. But the man before me was in exactly the same 
position as every other man in Logan. He had been brought 
out from England at the expense of the Perpetual Emigra- 
tion Fund (which is maintained partly by the " tithings," 
chiefly by voluntary donations), and though by his labour he 
had been able to pay for a lot of ground and to build him- 
self a house, to plant fruit-trees, buy a cow, and bring his 
lot under cultivation, he had not been able to pay off any of 
the loan of the Church. It stood, therefore, against him at 
the original sum. But his delinquency distressed him, and 
"having things comfortable about him," as he said, and 
some time to spare, he came of his own accord to his 
" Bishop," to ask if he could not ivork off part of his debt. 
He could not see his way, he said to any ready money, 
but he was anxious to repay the loan, and he came, there- 
fore, to offer all he had — his labour. Now, I cannot believe 
that this man was abused. I am sure he did not think he 
was abused himself. Here he was in Utah, comfortably 
settled for life, and at no original expense to himself. No 



Temple Mysteries, 139 

one had bothered him to pay up ; no one had tacked on 
usurious interest. So he came, like an honest man, to make 
arrangements for satisfying a considerate creditor, but all he 
got in answer was, that " there was time enough to pay " 
and an exchange of opinions about a plough or a harrow or 
something. And he went off as crushed down with debt as 
ever. And he very nearly added to his debt on the way, by 
narrowly escaping treading on a presumptuous chicken 
which was reconnoitring the interior of the house from the 
door-mat. 

To return to my drive. After seeing the town we drove 
up to the Temple. The Mormon " temples " must not be 
mistaken for their " tabernacles." The latter are the regular 
places of worship, open to the public. The former are 
buildings strictly dedicated to the rites of the Endowments, 
the meetings of the initiated brethren, and the ceremonial 
generally of the sacred Masonry of Mormonism. No one 
who has not taken his degrees m these mysteries has access 
to the temples, which are, or will be, very stately piles, con- 
structed on architectural principles said by the Church to 
have been revealed to Joseph Smith piecemeal, as the pro- 
gress of the first Temple (at Kirkland) necessitated, and 
said by the profane to be altogether contrary to all pre- 
viously received principles. However this may be, the style 
is, from the outside, not so prepossessing as the cost of the 
buildings and the time spent upon them would have led 
one to expect. The walls are of such prodigious thickness, 
and the windows so narrow and comparatively small, that the 
buildings seem to be constructed for defence rather than for 
worship. But once within, the architecture proves itself 
admirable. The windows gave abundant light and the 
loftiness of the rooms imparts an airiness that is as surprising 
as pleasing, while the arrangement of staircases— leading, as 



140 Sinners and Saints. 

I suppose, from the rooms of one degree in the " Masonry " 
to the next higher — and of the different rooms, all of con- 
siderable size, and some of very noble proportions indeed, is 
singularly good. 

I ought to say that this Temple at Logan is the only one 
I have entered, and it is only because it is not completed. 
This year the building will be finished — so it is hoped — and 
the ceremony of dedication will then attract an enormous 
crowd of Mormons. It is something over 90 feet in height 
(not including the towers, which are still wanting) and 
measures 160 feet by 70. On the ground floor, judging 
from what I know of the secret ritual of the Church, are the 
reception-rooms of the candidates for the " endowments," 
various official rooms, and the font for baptism. The great 
laver, 10 feet in diameter, will rest on the backs of twelve 
oxen cast in iron (and modelled from a Devon ox bred by 
Brigham Young) and will be descended to by flights of 
steps, the oxen themselves standing in water half-knee-deep. 
On the next floor are the apartments in which the allegorical 
panorama of the " Creation " and the "Fall of Man" will be 
represented. Here, too, will be the "Veil," the final degree 
in what might be called, in Masonic phrase, "craft" or 
" blue " Masonry, and, except for higher honorary grades, 
the ultimate objective point of Mormon initiation. Above 
these rooms is a vast hall, occupying the whole floor, in 
which general assemblies of the initiated brethren and 
" chapters " will be held. The whole forms a very imposing 
pile of great solidity and some grandeur, built of a gloomy, 
slate-coloured stone (to be eventually coloured a lighter 
tint), and standing on a magnificent site, being raised above 
the town upon an upper " bench" of the slope, and showing 
out superbly against the monstrous mountain about a mile 
behind it. The mountain, of course, dwarfs the Temple by 



A Wonder of the West, 141 

its proximity, but the position of the building, was un- 
doubtedly "an architectural inspiration," and gives the great 
pile all the dominant eminence which Mormons claim for 
their Church. 

From the platform of the future tower the view is one 
of the finest I have ever seen. The valley, reaching for 
twenty miles in one direction, and thirty in the other, 
with an average width of about ten miles, lies beneath 
you, level in the centre, and gradually sloping on every 
margin up to the mountains that bound it in. Immediately 
underneath you, Logan spreads out its breadth of farm-land 
and orchard and meadow, with the river — or rather two 
rivers, for the Logan forks just after leaving the canon — 
and the canal, itself a pleasant stream, carrying verdure 
and fertility into every nook and corner. To right and 
left and in front, delightful villages — Hirum, Mendon, 
Wellsville, Paradise, and the rest, all of them miniature 
Logans— break the broad reaches of crop-land, with their 
groves of fruit-trees, and avenues of willows and carob, 
box-elder, poplar, and maple, while each of them seems 
to be stretching out an arm to the other, and all of them 
trying to join hands with Logan. For lines of homesteads 
and groups of trees have straggled away from each pretty 
village, and, dotted across the intervening meadows of 
lucerne and fields of corn, form links between them all. 
Behind them rise the mountains, still capped and streaked 
with snow, but all bright with grass upon their slopes. 
It was a delightful scene, and required but little imagina- 
tion to see the 15,000 people of the valley grown into 
150,000, and the whole of this splendid tract of land one 
continuous Logan. And nothing can stop that day but an 
earthquake or a chronic pestilence. For Cache Valley 
depends for its prosperity upon something surer than 



142 Sinners and Saints, 

"wild-cat" speculations, or mines that have bottoms to 
fall out. The cumulative force of agricultural prosperity 
is illustrated here with remarkable significance, for the 
town, that for many years seemed absolutely stationary, has 
begun bom to consolidate and to expand with a determi- 
nation that will not be gainsaid. 

The sudden success of a mining camp is volcanic in 
its ephemeral rapidity. The gradual growth of an agricul- 
tural town is like the solid accretion of a coral island. 
The mere lapse of time will make it increase in wealth, 
and with wealth it will annually grow more beautiful. 
Even as it is, I think this settlement of Mormon farmers 
one of the noblest of the pioneering triumphs of the Far 
West ; and in the midst of these breathless, feverish States 
where every one seems to be chasing some will-o'-the-wisp 
with a firefly light of gold, or of silver — where terrible 
crime is a familiar feature, where known murderers walk 
in the streets, and men carry deadly weapons, where every 
other man complains of the fortune he only missed making 
by an accident, or laments the fortune he made in three 
days, and lost in as many hours — it is surpassingly strange 
to step out suddenly upon this tranquil valley, and find 
oneself among its law-abiding men. It is exactly like step- 
ping out of a mine shaft into the fresh pure air of daylight. 

The Logan police force is a good-tempered-looking 
young man. There is another to help him, but if they had 
not something else to do they would either have to keep 
on arresting each other, in order to pass the time, or else 
combine to hunt gophers and chipmunks. As it is, they 
unite other functions of private advantage with their con- 
stabulary performances, and thus justify their existence. 
As one explanation of the absence of crime, there is not 
a single licence for liquor in the town. 



No Drink — No Crime, 143 

Once upon a time there were three saloons in Logan. 
But one night a Gentile, passing through the town, shot the 
young Mormon who kept one of them, whereat the towns- 
folk lynched the murderer, and suppressed all the saloons. 
After a while licences were again issued, but a six months' 
experiment showed that the five arrests of the previous 
half-year had increased under the saloon system to fifty- 
six, so the town suppressed the licences again, and to-day 
you cannot buy any liquor in Logan. I am told, however, 
that an apostate, who is in business in the town, carries 
on a more or less clandestine distribution of strong drinks ; 
but any accident resulting therefrom, another murder, for 
instance, would probably put an end to his trade for ever, 
for it is not only the Mormon leaders, but the Mormon 
people that refuse to have drunkards among them. 

These facts about Logan are a sufficient refutation of 
the calumny so often repeated by apostates and Gentiles, 
that the Mormons are not the sober people they profess 
to be. The rules now in force in Logan were once in 
force in Salt Lake City, but thanks to reforming Gentiles 
there are now plenty of saloons and drunkards in the latter. 
At one time there were none, but finding the sale of drink 
inevitable, the Church tried to regulate it by establishing its 
own shops, and forbidding it to be sold elsewhere. But 
the Federal judge refused the application. So the city 
raised the saloon licence to 3600 dollars per annum ! Yet, 
in spite of this enormous tax, two or three bars managed 
to thrive, and eventually numbers of other men, encouraged 
by the conduct of the courts, opened drinking-saloons, 
refused to pay the licence, and defied — and still defy — all 
efforts of the city to bring them under control. In Logan, 
however, these are still the days of no drink, and the days 
therefore of very little crime. 



144 Sinners and Samts. 



CHAPTER XI. 

THROUGH THE MORMON SETTLEMENTS. 

Salt Lake City to Neplii — General similarity of the settlements — From 
Salt Lake Valley into Utah Valley — A lake of legends— Provo — 
Into the Juab valley — Indian reminiscences — Commercial inte- 
grity of the saints — At Nephi — Good work done by the saints^ 
Type of face in rural Utah — Mormon "doctrine" and Mormon 
•' meetings." 

The general resemblance between the populations of the 
various Mormon settlements is not more striking than the 
general resemblance between the settlements themselves. 

Two nearly parallel ranges of the Rocky Mountains, 
forming together part of the Wasatch range, run north and 
south through the length of Utah, and enclose between them 
a long strip of more or less desolate-looking land. Spurs 
run out from these opposing ranges, and meeting, cut off 
this strip into " valleys " of various lengths, so that, travel- 
ling from north to south, I crossed in succession, in the 
line of four hundred miles or so, the Cache, Salt Lake, 
Utah, Juab, San Pete, and Sevier valleys (the last enclosing 
Marysvale, Circle Valley and Panguitch Valley), and having 
there turned the end of the Wasatch range, travelled into 
Long Valley, which runs nearly east and west across the 
Territory. 

In the Cache and the Sevier valleys there are some 
noble expanses of natural meadow, but in all the rest the soil, 



The Settlements of the Church, 145 

where not cultivated, is densely overgrown with sage-brush, 
greasewood and rabbit-brush, and in no case except the 
Cache Valley (by far the finest section of the Territory) 
and Long Valley, is the water-supply sufficient to irrigate 
the whole area enclosed. The proportions under cultiva- 
tion vary therefore according to the amount of the water, 
and the size of the settlements is of course in an almost 
regular ratio with the acreage under the plough. But all 
are exactly on the same pattern. Wide streets — varying 
from 80 to 160 feet in width — avenued on either side with 
cotton-wood, box-elder, poplar, and locust-trees, and usually 
with a runnel of water alongside each side-walk, intersect 
each other at right angles, the blocks thus formed measuring 
from four to ten acres. These blocks hold, it may be, as 
many as six houses, but, as a rule, three, two, or only one ; 
while the proportion of fruit and shade-trees to dwelling- 
houses ranges from a hundred to one to twenty to one. As 
the lots are not occupied in any regular succession, there 
are frequent gaps caused by empty blocks, while the streets 
towards the outer limits of the towns are still half over- 
grown with the original sage-brush. All the settlements 
therefore, resemble each other, except in size, very closely, 
and may be briefly described as groves of trees and fruit 
orchards with houses scattered about among them. 

The settlements of the Church stretch in a line north 
and south throughout the whole length of the Territory, 
and on reaching the Rio Virgin, in the extreme south, 
follow the course of that river right across Utah to the 
eastern frontier. The soil throughout the line north and 
south appears to be of a nearly uniform character, as the 
same wild plants are to be found growing on it everywhere, 
and the sudden alternations of fertility and wilderness are 
due almost entirely to the abundance or absence of water. 

L 



. 1 46 Sinners and Saints, 

Leaving Salt Lake City to go south, we pass through 
suburbs of orchard and garden, with nearly the whole town 
in panoramic review before us, and find ourselves in half 
an hour upon levels beyond the reach of the city channels, 
and where the sage-brush therefore still thrives in un- 
disturbed glory. Bitterns rise from the rushes, and flights 
of birds wheel above the patches of scrub. And so to the 
Morgan smelting camp, and then the Francklyn works, 
where the ore of the Horn Silver Mine is worked, and 
then the Germania, one of the oldest smelting establish- 
ments in the Territory, where innocent ore of all kinds is 
taken in and mashed up into various " bullions " — irriia- 
menta maloi-um. Two small stations, each of them six peach- 
trees and a shed, slip by, and then Sandy, a small mining 
camp of poor repute, shuffles past, and next Draper, an 
agricultural settlement that seems to have grown fruit-trees 
to its own suffocation. 

The mountains have been meanwhile drawing gradually 
closer together, and here they join. Salt Lake Valley ends, 
and Utah Valley begins, and crossing a " divide " we 
find the levels of the Utah Lake before us, and the straggling 
suburbs of Lehi about us. These scattered cottages gradually 
thicken into a village towards the lake, and form a pleasant 
settlement of the orthodox Mormon type. The receipt for 
making one of these ought to be something as follows : 
Take half as much ground as you can irrigate, and ]:)lant it 
thickly with fruit-trees. Then cut it up into blocks by 
cutting roads through it at right 'angles ; sprinkle cottages 
among the blocks, and plant shade-trees along both sides 
of the roads. Then take the other half of your ground and 
spread it out in fields around your settlement, sowing to 
taste. 

The actual process is, of course, the above reversed 



A Lake of Legends. 147 

A log hut and an apple-tree start together in a field of corn, 
and the rest grows round them. But my receipt looks 
the easier of the two. 

Beyond Lehi, and all round it, cultivation spreads almost 
continuously — alternating delightfully with orchards and 
groves and meadows — to American Fork, a charming settle- 
ment, smothered, as usual, in fruit and shade-trees. The 
people here are very well-to-do, and they look it ; and their 
fields and herds of cattle have overflowed and joined those 
of Pleasant Grove — another large and prosperous Mormon 
settlement that lies further back, and right under the hills. 
It would be very difficult to imagine sweeter sites for such 
rural hamlets than these rich levels of incomparable soil 
stretching from the mountains to the lake, and watered by 
the canon streams. 

" Great Salt Lake " is, of course, the Utah Lake of the 
outside world. But "Utah Lake" proper, is the large 
sheet of fresh water which lies some thirty miles south of 
Salt Lake City, and gives its name to the valley which it 
helps to fertilize. All around it, except on the western 
shore, the Mormons have planted their villages, so that 
from Lehi you can look out on to the valley, and see at the 
feet of the encircling hills, and straggling down towards 
the lake, a semicircle of settlements that, but for the 
sterility of the mountain slopes on the west, might have 
formed a complete ring around it. But no springs rise on 
the western slopes, and the settlements of the valleys 
always lie, therefore, on the eastern side, unless some 
central stream gives facilities for irrigation on the western 
also. 

Utah Lake is a lake of legends. In the old Indian days it 
was held in superstitious reverence as the abode of the wind 
spirits and the storm spirits, and as being haunted by monsters 

L 2 



148 Sinners and S amis. 

of weird kind and great size. Particular spots were too un- 
canny for the red men to pitch their lodges there ; and 
even game had asylum, as in a city of refuge, if it chanced 
to run in the direction of the haunted shore. In later 
times, too, the Utah Lake has borne an uncomfortable 
reputation as the domain of strange water-apparitions, and 
several men have recorded visions of aquatic monsters, for 
which science as yet has found no name, but which, speaking 
roughly, appear to have been imitations of that delightful 
possibility, the sea serpent. Science, I know, goes dead 
against such gigantic worms, but this wonderful Western 
country has astonishment in store for the scientific world. 
If half I am told about the wondrous fossils of Arizona and 
thereabouts be true, it may even be within American 
resources to produce the kraken himself. In the mean 
time, as a contribution towards it, and a very tolerable 
instalment, too, I would commend to notice the great 
snake of the Utah Lake. It has frightened men — and, far 
better evidence than that, it has been seen by children 
when playing on the shore. I say "better," because 
children are not likely to invent a plausible horror in order 
to explain their sudden rushing away from a given spot 
with terrified countenances and a consistent narrative — a 
horror, too, which should coincide with the snake super- 
stitions of the Pi-Ute Indians. Have wise men from the 
East ever heard of this fabled thing? Does the Smithso- 
nianknow of this terror of the lake — this freshwater kraken — 
this new Mormon iniquity ? 

Visitors have made the American Fork Canon too well 
known to need more than a reference here, but the Provo 
Canon, with its romantic waterfalls and varied scenery, is a 
feature of the Utah Valley which may some day be equally 
familiar to the sight-seeing world. The botanist would 



Approach to Provo, 149 

find here a field full of surprises, as the vegetation is of 
exceptional variety, and the flowers unusually profuse. 
Down this canon tumbles the Provo River ; and as soon 
as it reaches the mouth — thinking to find the valley an 
interval of placid idleness before it attains the final 
Buddhistic bliss of absorption in the lake, the Nirvana 
of extinguished individuality — it is seized upon, and carried 
off to right and left by irrigation channels, and ruthlessly 
distributed over the slopes. And the result is seen, 
approaching Provo, in magnificent reaches of fertile land, 
acres of fruit-trees, and miles of crops. 

Provo is almost Logan over again, for though it has the 
advantage over the northern settlement in population, it 
resembles it in appearance very closely. There is the same 
abundance of foliage, the same width of water-edged 
streets, the same variety of wooden and adobe houses, 
the same absence of crime and drunkenness, the same 
appearance of solid comfort. It has its mills and its 
woollen factory, its " co-op." and its lumber-yards. There 
is the same profusion of orchard and garden, the same all- 
pervading presence of catde and teams. The daily life is 
the same too, a perpetual industry, for no sooner is break- 
fast over than the family scatters — the women to the dairy 
and household work, the handloom and the kitchen ; the 
rnen to the yard, the mill, and the field. One boy hitches 
up a team and is off in one direction ; another gets astride 
a barebacked horse and is off in another ; a third disap- 
pears inside a barn, and a fourth engages in conflict with a 
drove of calves. But whatever they are doing, they are all 
busy, from the old -man pottering with the water channels 
in the garden to the little girls pairing off to school ; and 
the visitor finds himself the only idle person in the settle- 
ment. 



150 Sinners and Saints, 

From Provo — through its suburbs of fohage and glebe- 
land— past Springville, a sweet spot, lying back under the 
hills with a bright quick stream flowing through it and 
houses mobbed by trees. Here are flour-mills and one of 
the first woollen mills built in Utah. In the days of its 
building the Indians harried the valley, and young men tell 
how as children they used to lie awake at nights to listen 
to the red men as they swept whooping and yelling through 
the quiet streets of the little settlement ; how the guns 
stood always ready against the wall, and the windows were 
barricaded every night with thick pine logs. What a dif- 
ference now ! Further on, but still looking on to the lake, 
is Spanish Fork {iiee Palmyra), where, digging a water 
channel the other day, the spade turned up an old copper 
image of the Virgin Mary, and some bones. This takes 
back the Mormon settlement of to-day to the long-ago time 
when Spanish missionaries preached of the Pope to the 
Piutes, and gave but little satisfaction to either man or 
beast, for their tonsured scalps were but scanty trophies 
and the coyote found their lean bodies but poor picking. 
Only fifteen years ago the Navajos came down into the 
valley through the canon which the Denver and Rio Grande 
line now traverses, but the Mormons were better prepared 
than the Spanish missionaries, and hunted the Navajo 
soul out of the Indians, so that Spanish Fork is now the 
second largest settlement in the valley, and the Indians come 
there begging. They are all of the " tickaboo " and ^^ good 
Injun" sort, the " how-how " mendicants of the period. All 
the inhabitants are farmers, and their settlement affords as 
good an illustration of the advantages of co-operation in 
stores, farm-work, mills— everything — as can well be 
adduced. 

Co-operation, by the way, is an important feature of 



Past and Present. 1 5 1 

Mormon life, and never, perhaps, so much on men's 
tongues and in their minds as at the present time. The 
whole community has been aroused by the consistent 
teaching of their leaders in their addresses at public " meet- 
ings," in their prayers in private households, to a sense of 
the "suicidal folly," as they call it, of making men wealthy 
(by their patronage) who use their power against the Saints; 
and the Mormons have set themselves very sincerely to 
work to trade only with themselves and to starve out the 
Gentiles. And it is very difficult indeed for an unpre- 
judiced man not to sym.pathize in some measure with the 
Mormons. By their honesty they have made the name 
" Mormon " respected in trade all over America, and have 
attracted shopkeepers, who on this very honesty have 
thriven and become wealthy in Utah — and yet some of 
these men, knowing nothing of the people except that they 
are straightforward in their dealings and honourable in their 
engagements, join in the calumny that the Mormons are a 
" rascally," " double-dealing " set. For my own part, I 
think the Church should have starved out some of these 
slanderers long ago. Even now it would be a step in li>-^ 
right direction if the Church slipped a " fighting apostle " at 
the men who go on day after day saying and writing that 
which they know to be untrue, calling, for instance, virtuous, 
hard-working men and women " the villainous spawn of 
polygamy," and advocating the encouragement of prosti- 
tutes as a " reforming agency for Mormon youth " ! Mean- 
while *' co-operation " as a religious duty is the doctrine 
of the day, and Gentile trade is already suffering in 
consequence. The movement is a very important one to 
the Territory, for if carried out on the proper princi- 
ples of co-operation, the people will live more cheaply 
here than in any other State in America. As it is, 



152 Sinners a7td Saints. 

many imported articles, thanks to co-operative competition, 
are cheaper here than further east, and when the boycotting 
is in full swing many more articles will also come down in 
price, as the Gentiles' profits will then be knocked off the 
cost to the purchaser. Every settlement, big and little, has 
its " co-op.," and the elders when on tour through the out- 
lying hamlets lose no opportunity for encouraging the 
movement and extending it. 

Passing Spanish Fork, and its outlying herds of horses, 
we see, following the curve of the lake, Salem, a little com- 
munity of farmers settled around a spring ; Payson, called 
Poteetnete in the old Indian days — after a chief who made 
life interesting, not to say exciting, for the early settlers — 
Springlake villa, where one family has grown up into a 
hamlet, and grown out of it, too, for they complain that 
they have not room enough and must go elsewhere ; and 
Santaquin, a little settlement that has reached out its fields 
right across the valley to the opposite slope of the hills. 
This was the spot where Abraham Butterfield, the only 
inhabitant of the place at the time, won himself a name 
among the people by chasing off a band of armed Indians, 
who had surprised him at his solitary work in the fields, by 
waving his coat and calling out to imaginary friends in the 
distance to " Come on." The Indians were thoroughly 
fooled, and fled back up the country incontinently, while 
Abraham pursued them hotly, brandishing his old coat with 
the utmost ferocity, and vociferously rallying nobody to the 
bloody attack. 

Here Mount Nebo, the highest elevation in the Territory 
was first pointed out to me — how tired I got of it before 
I had done ! — and through fields of lucerne we passed 
from the Utah into the Juab Valley and an enormous 
wilderness of sage-brush. It is broken here and there by 



Mona. 153 



an infrequent patch of cultivation, and streaks of paling 
go straggling away across the grey desert. But without 
water it is a desperate section, and the pillars of dust 
moving across the level, and marking the track of the 
sheep that wandered grazing among the sage, reminded 
me of the sand-wastes of Beluchistan, where nothing can 
move a foot without raising a tell-tale puff of dust. 

There, the traveller, looking out from his own cloud of 
sand, sees similar clouds creeping about all over the plain, 
judges from their size the number of camels or horses thatmay 
be stirring, and draws his own conclusions as to which may 
be peaceful caravans, and which robber-bands. By taking 
advantage of the wind, the desert banditti are able to 
advance to the attack, just as the devil-fish do on the sea- 
bottom, under cover of sand-clouds of their own stirring 
up ; and the first intimation which the traveller has of the 
character of those who are coming towards him, is the 
sudden flash of swords and glitter of spearheads that light 
up the edges of the advancing sand, just as Hghtning flits 
along the ragged skirts of a moving thunder-cloud. 

But here there are no Murri or Bhoogti horsemen astir, 
and the Indians, Piutes or Navajos, have not acquired 
Beluchi tactics. These moving clouds here are raised by 
loitering sheep, formidable only to Don Quixote and the 
low-nesting ground-larks. They are close feeders, though, 
these sheep, and it is poor gleaning after them, so it is a 
rule throughout the Territory that on the hills where sheep 
graze, game need not be looked for. 

An occasional ranch comes in sight, and along the old 
county road a waggon or two goes crawling by, and 
then we reach Mona, a pretty little rustic spot, but the 
civilizing radiance of corn-fields gradually dies away, and 
the relentless sage-brush supervenes, with here and there a 



154 Sinners and Saints, 

lucid interval of ploughed ground in the midst of the 
demented desert. With water the whole valley would be 
superbly fertile, as we soon see, for there suddenly 
breaks in upon the monotony of the weed-growths a 
splendid succession of fields, long expanses of meadow- 
land, large groves of orchards, and the thriving settlement 
of Nephi. 

Like all other prosperous places in Utah, it is almost 
entirely Mormon. There is one saloon, run by a Mormon, 
but patronized chiefly by the " outsiders " — for such is the 
name usually given to the " Gentiles " in the settlement — 
and no police. Local mills meet local requirements, and 
the " co-op." is the chief trading store of the place. There 
are no manufactures for export, but in grain and fruit there 
is a considerable trade. It is a quaint, straggling sort of 
place, and, like all these settlements, curiously primitive. 
The young men use the steps of the co-operative store as a 
lounge, and their ponies, burdened with huge Mexican 
saddles and stirrups that would do for dog-kennels, stand 
hitched to the palings all about. The train stops at the 
corner of the road to take up any passengers there may 
be. Deer are sometimes killed in the streets, and eagles 
still harry the chickens in the orchards. Wild-bird 
life is strangely abundant, and a flock of " canaries " — a 
very beautiful yellow siskin — had taken possession of my 
host's garden. "We do catch them sometimes," said his 
wife, " but they always starve themselves, and pine away 
till they are thin enough to get through the bars of the 
cage, and so we can never keep them." A neigHbour who 
chanced in, was full of canary-lore, and I remember one 
incident that struck me as very pretty. He had caught 
a canary and caged it, but the bird refused to be tamed, 
and dashed itself about the cage in such a frantic way 



At Nephu 155 



that out of sheer pity he let the wild thing go. A day 
or two later it came back, but with a mate, and when the 
cage was hung out the two birds went into captivity to- 
gether, of their own free-will, and lived as happily as birds 
could live ! 

My host was a good illustration of what Mormonism 
can do for a man. In Yorkshire he was employed in a 
slaughtering-yard, and thought himself lucky if he earned 
twelve shillings a week. The Mormons found him, "con- 
verted" him, and emigrated him. He landed in Utah 
without a cent in his pocket, and in debt to the Church 
besides. But he found every one ready to help him, and 
was ready to help himself, so that to-day he is one of 
the most substantial men in Nephi, with a mill that cost 
him $10,000 to put up, a shop and a farm, a house and 
orchard and stock. His family, four daughters and a son," 
are all settled round him and thriving, thanks to the aid 
he gave them — " but," said he, " if the Mormons had not 
found me, I should still have been slaughtering in the old 
country, and glad, likely, to be still earning my twelve 
shillings a week." Another instance from the same settle- 
ment is that of a boy who, five years ago, was brought out 
here at the age of sixteen. His emigration was entirely 
paid for by the Church. Yet last year he sent home from 
his own pocket the necessary funds to bring out his mother 
and four brothers and sisters ! God speed these Mormons, 
then. They are doing both " the old country and the 
new " an immense good in thus transforming English 
paupers into American farmers — and thus exchanging the 
vices and squalor of English poverty for the temperance, 
piety, and comfort of these Utah homesteads. I am not 
blind to their faults. My aversion to polygamy is sincere, 
and I find also that the Mormons must share with all 



156 Sinners and Saints, 

agricultural communities the blame of not sacrificing more 
of their own present prospects for the sake of their children's 
future, and neglecting their education, both in school and 
at home. But when I remember what classes of people 
these men and women are chiefly drawn from, and the 
utter poverty in which most of them arrive, I cannot, in 
sincerity, do otherwise than admire and respect the system 
which has fused such unpromising material of so many 
nationalities into one homogeneous whole. 

For myself, I do not think I could live among the 
Mormons happily, for my lines have been cast so long 
in the centres of work and thought, that a bovine atmo- 
sphere of perpetual farms suffocates me. I am afraid I 
should take to lowing, and feed on lucerne. But this does 
not prejudice me against the men and women who are 
so unmistakably happy. They are uncultured, from the 
highest to the lowest. But the men of thirty and upwards 
remember these valleys when they were utter deserts, and 
the Indian was lord of the hills ! As little children they 
had to perform all the small duties about the house, the 
'' chores," as they are called ; as lads they had to guard 
the stock on the hills ; as young men they were the pioneers 
of Utah. What else then could they be but ignorant — in 
the education of schools, I mean ? Yet they are sober in 
their habits, conversation, and demeanour, frugal, indus- 
trious, hospitable, and God-fearing. As a people, their 
lives are a pattern to an immense number of mankind, and 
every emigrant, therefore, taken up out of the slums of 
manufacturing cities in the old countries, or from the 
hideous drudgery of European agriculture, and planted 
in these Utah valleys, is a benefit conferred by Mormonism 
upon two continents at once. 

To return to Nephi. I went to a " meeting " in the 



Type of Face in rural Utah. 157 

evening, and to describe one is to describe all. The old 
men and women sit in front — the women, as a rule, all 
together in the body of the room, and the men at the 
sides. How this custom originated no one could tell me ; 
but it is probably a survival of habit from the old days 
when there was only room enough for the women to be 
seated, and the men stood round against the walls, and at 
the door. As larger buildings were erected, the women, 
as of old, took their accustomed seats together in the 
centre, and the men filled up the balance of the space. 
The oldest being hard of hearing and short of sight, 
would naturally, in an unconventional society, collect at 
the front of the audience. Looking at them all together, 
they are found to be exactly what one might expect — a 
congregation of hard-featured, bucolic faces, sun-tanned 
and deep-lined. Here and there among them is a bright 
mechanic's face, and here and there an unexpected refine- 
ment of intelligence. But taken in the mass, they are 
precisely such a congregation as fills nine-tenths of the 
rural places of worship all the world over. Conspicuously 
absent, however, is the typical American face, for the 
fathers and mothers among the Mormons are of every 
nationality, and the sons and daughters are a mixture of 
all. In the future this race should be a very fine one, for 
it is chiefly recruited from the hardier stocks, the English, 
Scotch, and Scandinavian, while their manner of life is 
pre-eminently fitted for making them stalwart in figure, and 
sound in constitution. 

The meeting opens with prayer, in which the Almighty 
is asked for blessings upon the whole people, upon each 
class of it, upon their own place in particular, upon all the 
Church authorities, and upon all friends of the Mormons. 
But never, so far as I have heard, are. intercessions made, 



158 Sinners and Saints, 

in the spirit of New Testament teaching, for the enemies 
of the Church. References to the author of the Edmunds 
Bill are often very pointed and vigorous. After the prayer 
comes a hymn, sung often to a lively tune, and accompanied 
by such instrumental music as the settlement can rely 
upon, after which the elders address the people in succes- 
sion. These addresses are curiously practical. They are 
temporal rather than spiritual, and concern themselves 
with history, official acts, personal reminiscences, and agri- 
cultural matter rather than points of mere doctrine. But 
as a fact, temporal and spiritual considerations are too 
closely blended in Mormonism to be disassociated. Thus 
references to the Edmunds Bill take their place naturally 
among exhortations to " live their religion," and to " build 
up the kingdom " in spite of " persecution." Boycotting 
Gentile tradesmen is similarly inculcated as showing a 
pious fidelity to the interests of the Church. These are 
the two chief topics of all addresses, but a passing reference 
to a superior class of waggon, or a hope that every one 
will make a point of voting in some coming election, is not 
considered out of place, while personal matters, the health 
of the speaker or his experiences in travel, are often thus 
publicly commented upon. The result is, that the people 
go away with some tangible facts in their heads, and sub- 
jects for ordinary conversation on their tongues, and not, 
as from other kinds of religious meetings, with only gene- 
ralities about their souls and the Ten Commandments. In 
other countries the gabble of small-talk that immediately 
overtakes a congregation let out of church sounds very in- 
congruous with the last notes of the organ voluntary that 
play them out of the House of God. But here the people 
walking homeward are able to continue the conversation on 
exactly the same lines as the addresses they have just 



Mormon ^^ Doc trine y 159 

heard, to renew it the next day, to carry it about with 
them as conversation from place to place, and thus even- 
tually to spread the "doctrine" of the elders over the 
whole district. A fact about waggon-buying sticks where 
whole sermons about salvation by faith would not 



i6o Sinners and Saints, 



CHAPTER XII. 



FROM NEPHI TO MANTI. 



English companies and their failures — A deplorable neglect of claret 
cup — Into the San Pete Valley — Reminiscences of the Indians — 
The forbearance of the red man — The great temple at Manti — 
Masonry and Mormon mysteries — In a tithing-house. 

From Nephi, a narrow-guage line runs up the Salt Creek 
Canon, and away across a wilderness to a little mining settle- 
ment called Wales, inhabited by Welsh Mormons who work 
at the adjacent coal-mines. The affair belongs to an 
English company, and it is worth noting that " English 
companies " are considered here to be very proper subjects 
for jest. When nobody else in the world will undertake a 
hopeless enterprise, an English company appears to be 
always on hand to embark in it, and this fact displays a 
confidence on the part of Americans in British credulity, 
and a confidence on the part of the Britishers in American 
honesty, which ought to be mutually instructive. Mean- 
while this has nothing to do with these coal-mines in the 
San Pete Valley, which, for all I know, may be very sound 
concerns, and very profitable to the " English company " in 
question. I hope it is. The train was rather a curious one, 
though, for it stopped for passengers at the corner of the 
street, and when we got " aboard," we found a baggage 
car the only vehicle provided for us. A number of apostles 



Wasted Borage. 1 6 1 

and elders were on Conference tour, and the party, therefore, 
was a large one ; so that, if the driver had been an enthusiastic 
anti-Mormon, he might have struck a severe blow at the 
Church by tilting us off the rails. The Salt Creek Canon 
is not a prepossessing one, but there grew in it an abundance 
of borage, the handsome blue heads of flowers showing 
from among the undergrowth in large patches. 

What a waste of borage! Often have I deplored 
over my claret in India the absence of this estimable 
vegetable, and here in Utah with a perfect jungle of borage 
all about me, I had no claret ! I pointed out to the apostles 
with us that temperance in such a spot was flying in the 
face of providence, and urged them to plant vineyards in 
the neighbourhood. But they were not enthusiastic, and 
I relapsed into silent contemplation over the incredible 
ways of nature, that she should thus cast her pearls of 
borage before a community of teetotallers. 

Traversing the canon, we enter San Pete Valley, memo- 
rable for the Indian War of 1865-67, but in itself as desolate 
and uninteresting a tract of country as anything I have 
ever seen. Ugly bald hills and leprous sand-patches in the 
midst of sage-brush, combined to form a landscape of 
utter dreariness ; and the little settlements lying away under 
the hills on the far eastern edge of the valley — Fountain 
Green, Maroni, and Springtown — seemed to me more like 
penal settlements than voluntary locations. Yet I am told 
they are pretty enough, and certainly Mount Pleasant, the 
largest settlement in the San Pete country, looked as if it 
deserved its name. But it stands back well out of the 
desperate levels of the valley, and its abundant foliage 
tells of abundant water. A pair of eagles circled high up 
in the sky above us as we rattled along, expecting us 
apparently to die by the way, and hoping to be our under- 

M 



1 62 Sinners a7td Saints. 

takers. A solitary coyote was pointed out to me, a lean 
and uncared-for person, that kept looking back over its 
shoulder as it trotted away, as if it had a lingering sort of 
notion that a defunct apostle might by chance be thrown 
overboard. It was a hungry and a thirsty looking country, 
and Wales, where we left our train, was a dismal spot. 
Here we found waggons waiting for us, and were soon on 
our way across the desert, passing a settlement-oasis now 
and again, and crossing the San Pete " river," which here 
sneaks along, a muddy, shallow stream, at the bottom of 
high, willow-fringed banks. And so to Fort Ephraim, a 
quaint little one-street sorj; of place that looks up to Manti, 
a few miles off, as a little boy looks up to his biggest 
brother, and to Salt Lake City as a cat might look up to a 
king. 

In 1865-67, however, it was an important point. 
Several companies of the Mormon militia were mustered 
here, and held the mountains and passes on the east 
against the Indians, guarded the stock gathered here from 
the other small settlements that had been abandoned, and 
took part in the fights at Thistle Creek, Springtown, Fish 
Lake, Twelve Mile Creek Gravelly Ford, and the rest, where 
Black Hawk and his flying squadron of Navajos and Piutes 
showed themselves such plucky men. It is a pity. I think, 
that the history of that three years' campaign has never 
been sketched, for, as men talk of it, it must have abounded 
with stirring incident and romance. Besides, a well-written 
history of such a campaign, with the lessons it teaches, 
might be useful some day — for the fighting spirit of the 
Indians is not broken, and when another Black Hawk 
appears upon the scene, 1865 might easily be re-enacted, and. 
Fort Ephraim once more be transformed from a farming 
hamlet to a military camp. 



Mormon and Red Man. 163 

Yet I have often wondered at the apathy or the friend- 
ship of the Indians. Herds of cattle and horses and sheep 
wander about among the mountains virtually unguarded. 
Little villages full of grain, and each with its store well 
stocked with sugar, and tobacco, and cloths, and knives, 
and other things that the Indians prize, lie almost defence- 
less at the mouths of canons. Yet they have not been 
molested for the last fifteen years. I confess that if I were 
an Indian chief, I should not be able to resist the tempta- 
tion of helping my tribe to an occasional surfeit of beef, 
with the amusement thrown in of plundering a co-operative 
store. But the Mormons say that the Indian is more honest 
than a white man and, in illustration of this, are ready to 
give innumerable instances of an otherwise inexplicable 
chivalry. For one thing, though, the Mormons are looked 
upon by the Indians in quite a different light to other 
Americans, for they consider them to be victims, like them- 
selves, of Federal dislike, while both as individuals and 
a class they hold them in consideration as being superior 
to Agents in fidelity to engagements. So that the compli- 
ment of honesty is mutually reciprocated. To illustrate 
this aspect of the Mormon-Indian relations, some Indians 
came the other day into a settlement, and engaged in a very 
protracted pow-wow, the upshot of all their roundabout 
palaver being this, that inasmuch as they, the Indians, had 
given Utah to the Mormons, it was preposterous for the 
Mormons to pay the Government for the land they took 
up! 

From Fort Ephraim to Manti the road lies chiefly through 
unreclaimed land, but within a mile or two of the town the 
irrigated suburbs of Manti break in upon the sage-brush, 
and the Temple, which has been visible in the distance 
half the day, grows out from the hills into definite details. 

M 2 



1 64 Sinners and Saints, 

The site of this imposing structure certainly surprised me 
both for the fine originahty of its conception, and the 
artistic sympathy with the surrounding scenery, which has 
directed its erection. The site originally was a rugged hill 
slope, but this has been cut out into three vast semicircular 
terraces, each of which is faced with a wall of rough hewn 
stone, seventeen feet in height. Ascending these by wide 
flights of steps, you find yourself on a fourth level, the hill 
top, which has been levelled into a spacious plateau, and on 
this, with its back set against the hill, stands the temple. 
The style of Mormon architecture, unfortunately, is heavy 
and unadorned, and in itself, therefore, this massive pile, 
160 feet in length by 90 wide, and about 100 high, is not 
prepossessing. But when it is finished, and the terrace 
slopes are turfed, and the spaces planted out with trees, the 
view will undoubtedly be very fine, and the temple be a 
building that the Mormons may well be proud of. Looked 
at from the plain, with the stern hills behind it, the edifice 
is seen to be in thoroughly artistic harmony with the 
scene, while the enormous expenditure of labour upon its 
erection is a matter for astonishment. The plan of the 
building inside differs from those of the temples at Logan, 
St. George, and Salt Lake City, which again differ from 
each other, for it is a curious fact that the ritual of the 
secret ceremonies to which these buildings are chiefly 
devoted, is still under elaboration and imperfect, so that 
each temple in turn partially varies from its predecessor, 
to suit the latest alterations made in the Endowments and 
other rites celebrated within its walls. In my description 
of the Logan Temple, I gave a sketch of the purposes for 
which the various parts of the building were intended. 
That sketch, of course, cannot pretend to be exact, for only 
those Mormons who have " worked " through the degrees 



Teinple Mysteries. 165 



can tell the whole truth \ and as yet no one has divulged 
it. But with a general knowledge of the rites, and an 
intimate acquaintance with freemasonry, I have, I believe, 
put together the only reliable outline that has ever been 
published. The Manti temple will have the same arrange- 
ments of baptismal font and dressing-rooms on the ground 
floor, but as well as I could judge from the unfinished state 
of the building, the " endowments," in the course of which 
are symbolical representations of the Creation, Temptation 
and Fall, will be spread over two floors, the apartment for 
" baptism for the dead " occupying a place on the lower. 
The "sealing" is performed on the third. I have an objec- 
tion to prying into matters which the Mormons are so 
earnest in keeping secret, but as a mason, the connexion 
between Masonry and Mormonism is too fascinating a 
subject for me to resist curiosity altogether. 

As a settlement, Manti is pretty, well-ordered and pro- 
sperous. The universal vice of unbridged water-courses 
disfigures its roads just as it does those of every other place 
(Salt Lake City itself not excepted), and the irregularity in 
the order of occupation of lots gives it the same scattered 
appearance that many other settlements have. But the 
abundance of trees, the width of the streets, the perpetual 
presence of running water, the frequency and size of the 
orchards, and the general appearance of simple, rustic, com- 
fort impart to Manti all the characteristic charm of the 
Mormon settlements. The orthodox grist and saw-mills, 
essential adjuncts of every outlying hamlet, find their usual 
place in the local economy; but to me the most interesting 
corner was the quaint tithing-house, a Dutch-barn kind 
of place, still surrounded by the high stone stockade which 
was built for the protection of the settlers during the Indian 
troubles fifteen years ago. Inside the tithing-house were 



1 66 Sinners and Saints. 



two great bins half filled with wheat and oats, and a few 
bundles of wool. I had expected to find a miscellaneous 
confusion of articles of all kinds, but on inquiry discovered 
that the popular theory of Mormon tithing, "a tenth of 
everything," — " even to the tenth of every egg that is laid," 
as a Gentile lady plaintively assured me, is not carried 
out in practice, the majority of Mormons allowing 
their tithings to run into arrears, and then paying them 
up in a lump in some one staple article, vegetable or 
animal, that happens to be easiest for them. The tenth 
of their eggs or their currant jam does not, therefore, as 
supposed, form part of the rigid annual tribute of these 
degraded serfs to their grasping masters. As a matter of 
fact, indeed, the payment of tithings is as nearly voluntary 
as the collection of a revenue necessary for carrying on a 
government can possibly be allowed to be. What it may 
have been once, is of no importance now. But to-day, so 
far from there being any undue coercion, I have amply 
assured myself that there is extreme consideration and 
indulgence, while the general prosperity of the territory 
justifies the leniency that prevails. 



The Jansens and Petersens, 1 67 



CHAPTER XIII. 



FROM MANTI TO GLENWOOD. 



Scandinavian Mormons — Danish ol — Among the orchards at Manti 
— On the way to Conference — Adam and Eve — The protoplasm 
of a settlement — Ham and eggs — At Mayfield — Our teamster's 
theory of the ground-hog — On the w^ay to Glenwood — Volcanic 
phenomena and lizards — A suggestion for improving upon Nature 
— Primitive Art 

"My hosts at Manti were Danes, and the wife brewed 
Danish 51." Such is the entry in my note-book, made, I 
remember, to remind me to say that the San Pete settle- 
ments are composed in great proportion of Danes and 
Scandinavians. These nationalities contribute more largely 
than any other — unless Great-Britishers are all called one 
nation — to the recruiting of Mormonism, and when they 
reach Utah maintain their individuality more conspicuously 
than any others. The Americans, Welsh, Scotch, English, 
Germans, and Swiss, merge very rapidly into one blend, but 
the Scandinavian type — and a very fine peasant type it is — 
is clearly marked in the settlements where the Hansens and 
the Jansens, Petersens, Christiansens, Nielsens, and Soren- 
sens, most do congregate. By the way, some of these 
Norse- names sound very curiously to the ear. " Ole Hagg " 
might be thought to be a nickname rather than anything 
else, and Lars Nasquist Bribl at best a joke. Their children 
are remarkably pretty, and the women models of thriftiness. 



1 68 Sinners and Saints, 

My hostess at Manti was a pattern. She made pies 
•under an inspiration^ and her chicken-pie was a distinct 
revelation. Her " beer " was certainly a beverage that a 
man might deny himself quite cheerfully, but to eat her 
preserves was like listening to beautiful parables, and her 
cream cheese gave the same gentle pleasure as the singing 
of thankful canticles. 

In the gaiden was an arbour overrun with a wild grape- 
vine, and I took my pen and ink in there to write. All 
went well for a while. An amiable cat came and joined me, 
sitting in a comfortable cushion-sort of fashion on the corner 
of my blotting-pad. But while we sat there writing, the 
cat and I, there came a humming-bird into the arbour — a 
little miracle in feathers, with wings all emeralds and a 
throat of ruby. And it sat in the sunlight on a vine-twig 
that straggled out across the door, and began to preen its 
tiny feathers. I stopped writing to watch the beautiful 
thing. And so did the cat. For happening to look down at 
the table I saw the cat, with a fiendish expression of face 
and her eyes intent on the bird, gathering her hind legs 
together for a spring. To give the cat a smack on the head, 
and for the cat to vanish with an explosion of ill-temper, 
" was the work of an instant." The humming-bird flashed 
out into the garden, and I was left alone to mop up the ink 
which the startled cat had spilt. Then I went out and 
wandered across the garden, where English flowers, the 
sweet-william and columbine, pinks and wallflowers, pansies 
and iris, were growing, under the fruit-trees still bunched 
with blossoms, and out into the street. Friends asked me 
if I wasn't going to " the conference," but I had not the 
heart to go inside when the world out of doors was so 
inviting. There was a cool, green tint in the shade of the 
orchards, pleasant with the voices of birds and dreamy with 



Primitive Life. 169 



the humming of bees. Tliere was nobody else about, only 
children making posies of apple-blossoms and launching blue 
boats of iris-petals on the little roadside streams. Everybody 
was " at conference," and those that could not get into the 
building were grouped outside among the waggons of the 
country folk who had come from a distance. These con- 
ferences are held quarterly (so that the lives of the Apostles 
who preside at them are virtually spent in travelling) and 
at them everything is discussed, whether of spiritual or 
temporal interest and a general balance struck, financially 
and religiously. In character they resemble the ordinary 
meetings of the Mormons, being of exactly the same curious 
admixture of present farming and future salvation, business 
advice and pious exhortation. 

Everybody who can do so, attends these meetings ; and 
they fulfil, therefore, all the purposes of the Oriental mela. 
Farmers, stock-raisers, and dealers generall}^, meet from a 
distance and talk over business matters, open negotiations 
and settle bargains, exchange opinions and discuss prospects. 
Their wives and families, such of them as can get away 
from their homes, foregather and exchange their domestic 
news, while everybody lays in a fresh supply of spiritual 
refreshment for the coming three months, and hears the 
latest word of the Church as to the Edmunds Bill and 
Gentile tradesmen. The scene is as primitive and quaint 
as can be imagined, for in rural Utah life is still rough and 
hearty and simple. To the stranger, the greetings of family 
groups, with the strange flavour of the Commonwealth days, 
the wonderful Scriptural or apocryphal names, and the old- 
fashioned salutation, are full of picturesque interest, while the 
meetings of waggons filled with acquaintances from remote 
corners of the country, the confusion of European dialects 
— imagine hearing pure Welsh among the San Pete sage- 



1 70 Sinners mid Saints. 

brush ! — the unconventional cordiaUty of greeting, are 
deHghtful both in an intellectual and artistic sense. 

I have travelled much, and these social touches have 
always had a charm for me, let them be the demure reunions 
of Creoles sous les filaos in Mauritius ; or the French negroes 
chattering as they go to the baths in Bourbon ; the deep- 
drinking convivialities of the Planters' Club in Ceylon ; the 
grinning, prancing, rencontres of Kaffir and Kaffir, or the 
stolid collision of Boer waggons on the African veldt ; the 
stately meeting of camel-riding Beluchis on the sandy//// 
of Khelat; the jingling ox-drawn ekkas foregathered to 
" bukh " under the tamarind-trees of Bengal ; the reserved 
salutations of Hindoos as they squat by the roadside to 
discuss the invariable lawsuit and smoke the inevitable hub- 
ble-bubble; the noisy congregation of Somali boatmen 
before their huts on the sun-smitten shores of Aden ; — what a 
number of reminiscences I could string together of social 
traits in various parts of. the world! And these Mormon 
peasants, pioneers of the West, these hardy sons of hardy 
sires, will be as interesting to me in the future as any others, 
and my remembrance of them will be one of admiration for 
their unfashionable virtues of industry and temperance, and 
of gratitude for their simple courtesy and their cordial 
hospitality. 

As we left Manti behind us, the waggons " coming into 
conference " got fewer and fewer, and soon we found our- 
selves out alone upon the broad levels of the valley, with 
nothing to keep us company but a low range of barren hills 
that did their best to break the monotony of the landscape. 
In places, the ground was white with desperate patches of 
" saleratus," the saline efflorescence with which agriculture 
in this Territory is for ever at war, and resembling in 
appearance, taste, and effects the " reh " of the Gangetic 



Adam and Eve, ' lyi 

plains. Here, as in India, irrigation is the only known 
antidote, and once wash it out of the soil and get crops 
growing and the enemy retires. But as soon as cultivation 
ceases or irrigation slackens, the white infection creeps 
over the ground again, and if undisturbed for a year 
resumes possession. How unrelenting Nature is in her 
conflict with man I 

We passed some warm springs a few miles from Manti, 
but the water though slightly saline is inodorous, and on 
the patches which they water I saw the wild flax growing 
as if it enjoyed the temperature and the soil. Then Six- 
Mile Creek, a pleasant little ravine, crossed by a rustic 
bridge, which gives water for a large tract of land, and so 
to Sterling, a settlement as yet in its cradle, and curiously 
illustrative of " the beginning of things " in rural Utah. 
One man and his one wife up on the hillside doing some- 
thing to the water, one cock and one hen pecking together 
in monogamous sympathy, one dog sitting at the door of a 
one-roomed log-hut. Everything was in the Adam and 
Eve stage of society, and primeval. So Deucalion and 
Pyrrha had the earth to themselves, and the "rooster" 
stalked before his mate as if he was the first inventor of 
posterity. But much of this country is going to come 
under the plough in time, for there is water, and in the mean- 
time, as giving promise of a future with some children in it, 
there is a school-house~an instance of forethought which 
gratified me. 

The country now becomes undulating, remaining for the 
most part a sterile-looking waste of grease-wood, but having 
an almost continuous thread of cultivation running along 
the centre of the valley which, a few miles further on, 
suddenly widens into a great field of several thousand acres! 
On the other side of it we found May field. 



172 Sinners and Saints, 

In Mayfield every one was gone to the Conference 
except a pretty girl, left to look after all the children 
of the village, and who resisted our entreaties for hos- 
pitality with a determination that would have been more 
becoming in an uglier person — and an old lady, left under 
the protection of a big blind dog and a little bobtailed calf. 
She received us with the honest courtesy universal in the 
Territory, showed us where to put our horses and where 
the lucerne was stacked, and apologized to us for having 
nothing better than eggs and ham to offer ! 

Fancy nothing better than eggs and ham ! To my mind 
there is nothing in all travelling so delightful as these eggs- 
and-ham interruptions that do duty for meals. Not only is 
the viand itself so agreeable, but its odour when cooking 
creates an appetite. 

What a moral there is here ! We have all heard of the 
beauty of the lesson that those flowers teach us which give 
forth their sweetest fragrance when crushed. But I think the 
conduct of eggs and ham, that thus create an appetite in 
order to increase man's pleasure in their own consumption, 
is attended with circumstances of good taste that are 
unusually pleasing. 

In our hostess's house at Mayfield I saw for the first 
time the ordinary floor-covering of the country through 
which we subsequently travelled — a " rag-carpet." It is 
probably common all over the world, but it was quite new 
to me. I discussed its composition one day with a mother 
and her daughter. 

" This streak here is Jimmy's old pants, and that darker 
one is a military overcoat. This is daddy's plush vest. 
This bit of the pattern is — " 

"No, mother, that's your old jacket-back; don't you 
remember ? " — and so on all through the carpet. 



Rag'Cm'pet, i "j^^ 



Every stripe in it had an association, and the story of the 
whole was pretty nearly the story of their entire lives in the 
country. 

" For it took us seven years to get together just this one 
strip of carpet. We folks haven't much, you see, that's fit 
to tear up." 

I like the phrase '' fit to tear up," and wonder when, in 
the opinion of this frugal people, anything does become 
suitable for destruction. But it is hardly destruction after all 
to turn old clothes into carpets, and the process is as simple 
as, in fact is identical with, ordinary hand-weaving. The cloth 
is simply shredded into very narrow strips, and each strip 
is treated in the loom just as if it were ordinary yarn, the 
result being, by a judicious alternation of tints, a very 
pleasant-looking and very durable floor-cloth. Rag-rugs 
are also made on a foundation of very coarse canvas by 
drawing very narrow shreds of rag through the spaces of 
the canvas, fastening them on the reverse side, and cutting 
them off to a uniform " pile " on the upper. In one cottage at 
Salina I remember seeing a rug of this kind in which the 
girl had drawn her own pattern and worked in the colours 
with a distinct appreciation of true artistic effect. An in- 
dustrial exhibition for such products would, I have no 
doubt, bring to hght a great many out-of-the-way handi- 
crafts which these emigrant people have brought with them 
from the different parts of Europe, and with which they try 
to adorn their simple homes. 

Our teamster from May field to Glen wood, the next stage 
of my southward journey, was a very cautious person. He 
would not hurry his horses down hill — they were " belike " 
to stumble ; and he would not hurry them up hill — it 
"fretted" them. On the level intervals he stopped 
altogether, to "breathe" them. It transpired eventually 



1 74 Sinners and Saints, 

that they were plough horses. I suspected it from the first 
And from his driving I suspected that he was the plough- 
man. In other respects he was a very desirable teamster. 

His remarks about Europe (he had once been to Chicago 
himself) were very entertaining, and his theory of " ground 
hogs" would have delighted Darwin. As far as I could 
follow him, all animals were of one species, the differences 
as to size and form being chiefly accidents of age or sex. 
This, at any rate, was m.y induction from his description of 
the "ground hog," which he said was a " kind of squirrel — 
like the prairie dog!" As he said, there, were "quite a 
few " ground hogs, but they moved too fast among the brush 
for me to identify them. As far as I could tell, though, 
they were of the marmot kind, about nine inches long, with 
very short tails and round small ears. When they were at 
a safe distance they would stand up at full length on their 
hind legs, the colouring underneath being lighter than on 
the back. What are they? I have seen none in Utah 
except on these volcanic stretches of country between 
Salina and Monroe. 

Much of Utah is volcanic, but here, beyond Salina, huge 
mounds of scoriae, looking like heaps of slag from some 
gigantic furnace, are piled up in the centre of the level 
ground, while in other places circular depressions in the 
soil — sometimes fifty feet in diameter and lowest in the 
centre, with deep fissures defining the circumference— seem 
to mark the places whence the scoriae had been drawn, and 
the earth had sunk in upon the cavities thus exhausted. 

The two sides of the river (the Sevier) were in striking 
contrast. On this, the eastern, was desolation and stone 
heaps and burnt-up spaces with ant-hills and lizards. 

Nothing makes a place look (to me at least) so hot as 
an abundance of lizards. They are associated in memory 



Along the Sevier, 175 

with dead, still heat, " the intolerable calor of Mambre," 
the sun-smitten cinder-heap that men call Aden, the stifling 
hillsides of Italy where the grapes lie blistering in the 
autumn sun, the desperate suburbs of Alexandria — what 
millions of scorched-looking lizards, detestable little sala- 
manders, used to bask upon Cleopatra's Needles when they 
lay at full length among the sand ! — the heat-cracked fields 
of India. I know very well that there are lizards and 
lizards ; that they might be divided — as the Hindoo divides 
everything, whether victuals or men's characters, medicines 
or the fates the gods send him — into "hot" and "cold'* 
lizards. The salamander itself, according to the ancients, 
was icy cold. But this does not matter. All lizards make 
places look hot. 

On the other side of the river, a favourite raiding-ground 
of " Mr. Indian," as the settlers pleasantly call him, lies 
Aurora, a settlement in the centre of a rich tract of red wheat 
soil with frequent growths of willow and buffalo-berry (or 
bull-berry or red-berry or " kichi-michi ") marking the course 
of the Sevier. 

But our road soon wound down by a " dug way " to the 
bottom-lands, and we found ourselves on level meadows 
clumped with shrubs and patched with corn-fields, and 
among scattered knots of grazing cattle and horses. Over- 
head circled several pairs of black hawks, a befitting 
reminder to the dwellers on these Thessalian fields, these 
Campanian pastures, that Scythian Piutes and Navajo 
Attilas might at any time swoop down upon them. 

But the forbearance of the Indian in the matter of beef and 
mutton is inexplicable — and most inexplicable of all in the 
case of lamb, seeing that mint grows wild. This is a very 
pleasing illustration of the happiness of results when man and 
nature work cordially together. The lamb gambols about 



I ']^ Sinners and Saints, 

among beds of mint ! What a becoming sense of the fitness 
of things that would be that should surprise the innocent 
thing in its fragrant pasture and serve up the two together ! 
*' They were pleasant in their lives, and in death they were 
not divided." And what a delightful field for similar efforts 
such a spectacle opens up to the philosophic mind ! Here, 
beyond Aurora, as we wind in and out among the brakes 
of willow and rose-bush, we catch glimpses of the river, with 
ducks riding placidly at anchor in the shadows of the foliage. 
And not a pea in the neighbourhood ! Now, why not sow 
green peas along the banks of the American rivers and 
lakes ? How soothing to the weary traveller would be this 
occasional relief of canard aux petits pois I 

After an interval of pretty river scenery we found our- 
selves once more in a dismal, volcanic "country with bald 
hills and leprous sand- patches the only features of the 
landscape, with lizards for flowers and an exasperating 
heat-drizzle blurring the outlines of everything with its 
quivering refraction. And then, after a few miles of this, 
we are suddenly in the company of really majestic mountains, 
some of them cedared to the peaks, others broken up into 
splendid architectural designs of almost inconceivable 
variety, richly tinted and fantastically grouped. How 
wealthy this range must be in mineral ! In front of us, 
above all the intervening hills, loomed out a monster 
mountain, and turning one of its spurs we break all at once 
upon the village of Glenwood- a beautiful cluster of foliage 
with skirts of meadow-land spread out all about it— lying at 
the foot of the huge slope. 

Near Glenwood is an interesting Httle lake that I visited. 
Its water is exquisitely clear and very slightly warm. Though 
less than a foot deep in most places (it has one pool twelve 
feet in depth), it never freezes, in spite of the intense cold at 



Indian Hieroglyphics. 177 

this altitude. It is stocked with trout that do not grow to 
any size, but which do not on the other hand seem to 
diminish in numbers, although the consumption is consider- 
able. The botany in the neighbourhood of the lake is very 
interesting, the larkspur, lupin, mimulus, violet, heart's-ease, 
ox-eye, and several other familiar plants of English gardens, 
growing wild, while a strongly tropical flavour is given to 
the vegetation by the superb footstools of cactus- imagine 
sixty-one brilliant scarlet blossoms on a cushion only fifteen 
inches across ! — by the presence of a gorgeous oriole (the 
body a pure yellow freaked with black on the wings, and 
the head and neck a rich orange), and by a large butterfly 
of a clear flame- colour with the upper wings sharply hooked 
at the tips. Flower, bird, and insect were all in keeping 
with the Brazils or the Malayan Archipelago. 

On a rock, close by the grist-mill, is the only specimen 
of the much-talked-of Indian " hieroglyphics " that I have 
seen. They may of course be hieroglyphics, but to me they 
look like the first attempts of some untutored savage youth 
to delmeate in straight Hnes the human form divine. Or 
they may be only his attempts to delineate a cockroach. 



178 Sinners and Saints. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

FROM GLENWOOD TO MONROE. 

From Glenwood to Salina — Deceptiveness of appearances— An apos- 
tate Mormon's friendly testimony — Reminiscences of the Prophet 
Joseph Smith — Rabbit-hunting in a waggon — Lost in the sage- 
brush — A day at Monroe — Girls riding pillion — The Sunday 
drum — Waiting for the right man : *' And what if he is married ? " 
— The truth about apostasy : not always voluntary. 

Soon after leaving Glenwood, cultivation dies out, and for 
twelve miles or so the rabbit-brush and grease-wood — the 
" atriplex " of disagreeably scientific travellers, who always 
speak of sage-brush as " artemisia," and disguise the gentle 
chipmunk as "spermophilus" — divide the land between them. 
The few flowers, and these all dwarfed varieties, attest the 
poverty of the soil. The mountains, however, do their best 
to redeem the landscape, and the scenery, as desolate 
scenery, is very fine. The ranges that have on either hand 
rolled along an unbroken series of monotonous contour, now 
break up into every conceivable variety of form, mimicking 
architecture or rather multiplying its types, and piUng bluffs, 
pierced with caves, upon terraces, and pinnacles upon 
battlements. Causeways, like that in Echo Canon, slant 
down their slopes, and other vestiges of a terrific aqueous 
action abound. Next to this riot of rock comes a long 
series of low hills, grey, red, and yellow, utterly destitute of 
vegetation, and so smooth that it looks as if the place were 
a mountain-yard, where Nature made her mountains, and had 



Where Black Hawk fought, 179 

collected all her materials about her in separate convenient 
mounds before beginning to mix up and fuse. In places 
they were richly spangled with mica, giving an appearance of 
sparkling, trickling water to the barren slopes. 

On the other side of the valley, the mountains, discoun- 
tenancing such frivolities, had settled down into solid- 
bottomed masses of immense bulk, the largest mountains, 
in superficial acreage, I had seen all the journey, and densely 
cedared. 

With Gunnison in sight across the valley, we reached 
Willow Creek, a pleasant diversion of water and foliage in 
the dreary landscape, and an eventful spot in the last Indian 
war, for among these willows here Black Hawk made a stand 
to dispute the Mormons' pursuit of their plundered stock, and 
held the creek, too, all the day. And so out on to the mono- 
tonous grease-wood levels again — an Indians' camp lire 
among the cedars, the only sign of a living thing— and ovei 
another " divide," and so into the Sevier Valley. The river 
is seen flowing along the central depression, with the Red- 
Mound settlement on the other side of the stream, and 
Salina on this side of it, lying on ahead. 

Salina is one of those places it is very hard to catch. 
You see it first " about seven " miles off, and after travel- 
ling towards it for an hour and a half, find you have still 
" eight miles or so " to go. " Appearances are very decep- 
tive in this country," as these people delight in saying to 
new-comers, and the following story is punctually told, at 
every opportunity, to illustrate it. 

A couple of Britishers {of course " Britishers ") started off 
from their hotel " to walk over to that mountain there," just 
to get an appetite for breakfast. About dinner-time one of 
them gave up and came back, leaving his obstinate friend 
to hunt the mountain by himself. After dining, liovvever, he 

N 2 



1 80 Sinners and Saints, 

took a couple of horses and rode out after his friend, and 
towards evening came up with him just as he was taking off 
his shoes and stockings by the side of a two-foot ditch. 

*' Hallo ! " said the horseman, " what on earth are you 
doing. Jack ? " 

^^ Doing /" replied the other sulkily. " Can't you see? I 
am taking off my boots to wade this infernal river." 

"River!" exclaimed his friend; "what river? That 
thing's only a two-foot ditch ! " 

" Daresay,*' was the dogged response. " It looks only 2 
two-foot ditch. But you can't trust anything in this beastly 
country. Appea^-ances are so deceptive. "" 

But we caught Salina at last, for we managed to head it 
up into a cul-de-sac of the mountains, and overtook it about 
sundown. A few years ago the settlement was depopulated ; 
for Black Hawk made a swoop at it from his eyrie among 
the cedars on the overlooking hill, and after killing a few of 
the people, compelled the survivors to fly northward, where the 
miUtia was mustering for the defence of the valley. It was in 
this war that the Federal officer commanding the post at Salt 
Lake City, acting under the orders of General Sherman, re- 
fused to help the settlers, telling them in a telegram of twenty 
words to help themselves. The country, therefore, remem- 
bers with considerable bitterness that three years' campaign 
against a most formidable combination of Indians; when 
they lost so many hves, when two counties had to be entirely 
abandoned, many scattered settlements broken up, and an 
immense loss in property and stock suffered. 

At Salina I met an apostate Mormon who had deserted 
the religion because he had grown to disbelieve in it, but 
who had retained, nevertheless, all his respect for the 
leaders of the Church and the general body of Mormons. 
He is still a polygamist ; that is to say, having married two 



The Prophet an Athlete, i8i 

wives, he has continued to treat them honourably as wives. 
With me was an apostle, one of the most deservedly popular 
elders of the Church, and it was capital entertainment to 
hear the apostate and the apostle exchanging their jokes at 
each other's expense. I was shown at this house, by the 
way, an emigration loan receipt. The emigrant, his wife, 
and three children, had been brought out in the old waggon 
days at $50 a head. Some fifteen years later, when the 
man had become well-to-do and after he had apostatized, he 
repaid the $250, and some $50 extra as "interest." The 
loan ticket stipulated for " ten per cent, per annum," but 
as he said, it was " only Mormons who would have let him 
run on so long, and then have let him off so much of the 
interest." 

My host was himself an interesting man, for he had been 
with the Saints ever since the stormy days of Kirtland, and 
had known Joseph Smith personally. "Ah, sir, he was 2. 
noble man ! " said the old fellow. Among other out-of-the- 
way items which he told me about the founder of the faith, 
was his predilection for athletic exercises and games of all 
kinds ; how he used to challenge strangers to wrestle, and be 
very wroth when, as happened once, the stranger threw him 
over the counter of a shop ; and how he used to play base- 
ball with the boys in the streets of Nauvoo. This trait of 
Joseph Smith's character I have never seen noticed by his 
biographers, but it is quite noteworthy, as also, 1 think, is the 
extraordinary fascination which his personal appearance — 
for he was a very handsome man of the Sir Robert Peel 
type — seems to have exercised over his contemporaries. 
When speaking to them, I find that one and all will glance 
from the other aspects of his life to this— that he was "a 
noble man." 

Rabbit-hunting across country in a two-horse waggon is 



1 82 Sinners and Sai7tts. 

not a sport I shall often indulge in again. The rabbit has 
things too much its own way. It does not seem to be a 
suitable animal for pursuing in a vehicle. It is too evasive. 

Indeed, but for an accident, I should probably never have 
indulged in it at all. But it happened that on our way from 
Salina to Monroe we lost our way. Our teamster, for in- 
scrutable reasons of his own, turned off from the main road 
into a bye-track, which proved to have been made by some 
one prospecting for clay, and the hole which he had exca- 
vated was its terminus. I tried to think out his reason for 
choosing this particular road, the least and most unpromis- 
ing of the three that offered themselves to him. It was 
probably this. Two out of the three roads, being wrong ones, 
were evils. One of these was larger than the other, and so 
of the two evils he chose the less. Q.E.D. 

To get back into the road we struck across the sage-brush, 
and in so doing started a jack-rabbit. As it ran in the direc- 
tion we wanted to go, we naturally followed it. But the jack- 
rabbit thought we were in murderous pursuit, and performed 
prodigies of agiUty and strategy in order to escape us. But 
the one thing that it ought to have done, got out of our 
road, it did not do. We did not gain on the lively animal, 
I confess, for it was all we could do to retain our seats, but 
we gave it enough to prose about all the days of its life. 
What stories the younger generation of jack-rabbits will 
hear of " the old days " when desperate men used to come 
out thousands of miles in two-horse waggons with canvas 
hoods to try and catch their ancestors ! And what a hero 
that particular jack-rabbit which we did not hunt will be ! 

The road southwards leads along hillsides, both up and 
down, but on the whole gradually ascending, till the summit 
of the spur is reached. Here one of the most enchanting 
landscapes possible is suddenly found spread out beneath you. 



Lost in the Sage-brush. j 2>2, 

A vast expanse of green meadow-land with pools of blue 
water here and there, herds of horses grazing, flocks of wild 
fowl in the air, and on the right the settlement of Richfield 
among its trees and red-soiled corn-fields ! 

Crossing this we found that a spur, running down on it, 
divides it really into two, or rather conceals a second plain 
from sight. But in the second, sage-brush, " the damnable 
absinthe," that standard of desolation, waves rampant, and 
the telegraph wire that goes straddling across it seems as if 
it must have been laid solely for the convenience of larks. 
Every post has its lark, as punctually as its insulator, and 
every lark lets off its three delicious notes of song as we go 
by, just as if the birds were sentries passing on a " friend " 
from picket to picket. And here it was that we adventured 
with the jack-rabbit, much to our own discomfiture. But 
while we were casting about for our lost road, we came upon 
a desolate little building, all alone in the middle of th6 waste, 
which we had supposed to be a deserted ranch-house, 
and were surprised to find several waggons standing about. 
Just as we reached it, the owners of the waggons came out, 
and then we discovered that it was the " meeting-house " 
for the scattered ranches round, and seeing the several 
parties packing themselves into the different waggons re- 
membered (from a certain Sabbatical smartness of apparel) 
that it was Sunday. We were soon on our right road again, 
and passing the hamlets of Inverary and Elsinore on the 
right, came in sight of Monroe, and through a long prelude 
of cultivation reached that quaint little village just appa- 
rently at the fashionable hour for girls to go out riding with 
their beaux. 

Couple after couple passed us, the girls riding pillion 
behind their sweethearts, and very well contented they all 
seemed to be, with their arms round 'the object of their 



1 84 Sinners and Saints. 

affections. Except in France once or twice, I do not recol- 
lect ever having seen this picturesque old custom in prac- 
tice ; but judging from the superior placidity of his coun- 
tenance and the merriment on hers, I should say it was an 
enjoyable one, and perhaps worth reviving. 

Another interesting feature of Sunday evening in Monroe 
was the big drum. It appeared that the arrival of the Apostle 
who was with me had been expected, and that the people, who 
are everywhere most curiously on the alert for spiritual refresh- 
ment, had agreed that if the Apostle on arriving felt equal 
to holding a meeting, the big drum was to be beaten. In 
due course, therefore, a very little man disappeared inside 
a building and shortly reappeared in custody of a very big 
drum, which he proceeded to thump in a becoming Sab- 
batical manner. But whether the drum or the association 
of old band days overcame him, or whether the devil 
entered into him or into the drum, it is certain that he soon 
drifted into a funereal rendering of " Yankee Doodle." 
He was conscious, moreover, of his lapse into weekday 
profanity, and seemed to struggle against it by beating pon- 
derous spondees. But it was of no use. Either the drum or 
the devil was too big for him, and the solemn measure kept 
breaking into patriotic but frivolous trochaics. Attracted 
by these proceedings, the youth of the neighbourhood had 
collected, and their intelligent aversion to monopolists was 
soon apparent by their detaching the little barnacle from his 
drum and subjecting the resonant instrument to a most irre- 
gular bastinado. They all had a go at it, both drumsticks 
at once, and the result was of a very unusual character, as 
neither of the performers could hear distinctly what was going 
on on the other side of the drum, and each, therefore, worked 
quite independently. In the meanwhile some one had pro- 
cured a concertina, and this, with a dog that had a fine 



Some Mormon spinsters, 185 

falsetto bark, constituted a very respectable " band " in 
point of noise. Thus equipped, the lads started off to beat 
up the village, and working with that enthusiasm which 
characterizes the self-imposed missions of youth, were very 
successful. Everybody came out to their doors to see what 
was going on, and having got so far, they then went on to 
the meeting. By twos and threes and occasional tens the 
whole village collected inside the meeting-house, or round 
the door unable to get in, and I must confess that looking 
round the room, I was surprised at the number of pretty 
peasant faces that Monroe can muster. 

And here for the first time I became aware of a very 
significant fact, and one that well deserves notice, though I 
have never heard or seen it referred to — I mean the number 
of handsome marriageable girls who are unmarried in the 
Mormon settlements. Omitting other places, in each of 
which many well-grown, comely girls can be found unmar- 
ried, I saw in the hamlet of Monroe enough unwedded 
charms to make me think that either the resident polygamist 
had very bad taste or very bad luck. My host, a Mormon, 
was a widower (a complete widower I mean), and two very 
pretty girls, neighbours, looked after his household affairs 
for him. One was a blonde Scandinavian of Utah birth ; 
the other a dark-haired Scotch lassie emigrated three years 
ago — and each was just eighteen. (And in the Western 
country eighteen looks three-and-twenty.) I asked my host 
why he did not marry one of them, or both, and he told me 
that he had a family growing up, and that he had so often 
seen quarrels and separations result from the remarriage of 
fathers that he did not care to risk it. 

And the Apostle, who was present, said, " Quite right." 
Now please remember this was in polygamous Utah, in a 
secluded village, entirely Mormon, where, if anywhere, men 



1 86 Sinners and Saints. 

and women might surely do as they pleased. In any 
monogamous society such a reason, followed by the approval 
of a Church dignitary, would not be worth commenting on, 
but here among Mormons it was significant enough. 

I spoke to the girls, and asked them why they had not 
married. 

" Because the right man has not come along yet," said 
one. 

" But perhaps when the right man does come along he 
will be married already," I said. 

" And why should that make any differe?ice ? " was the 
reply. 

In the meantime each of these shapely daughters of Eve 
had a " beau " who took her out riding behind him, escorted 
her home from meeting, and so forth. But neither of them 
had found " the right man." 

Of Monroe, therefore, one of those very places, retired 
from civilization, " where the polygamous Mormon can 
carry on his beastly practices undetected, and therefore 
unpunished " — as the scandalous clique of Salt Lake City 
(utterly ignorant of Mormonism except what it can pick up 
from apostates) is so fond of alleging — I can positively state 
from personal knowledge that there are both men and 
women there who are guided in matters of marriage by the 
very same motives and principles that regulate the relation 
in monogamous society. Further, I can positively state 
the same of several other settlements, and judging 
from these, and from Salt Lake City, I can assure my 
readers that the standard of public morality among the 
Mormons of Utah is such as the Gentiles among them are 
either unable or unwilling to live up to. 

In this connexion it is worth noting that public morality 
has in Utah one safeguard, over and above all those of 



Church Surveillance, 187 

other countries, namely, the strict surveillance of the Church. 
T have enjoyed while in Utah such exceptional advantages 
for arriving at the truth, as both Gentiles and Mormons say 
have never been extended to any former writer, and among 
other facts with which I have become acquainted is the 
silent scrutiny into personal character which the Church 
maintains. 

Profanity, intemperance, immorality, and backbiting are 
taken quiet note of, and if persisted in against advice, are 
punished by a gradual withdrawal of " fellowship \ " and 
result in what the Gentiles call "apostasy." Among the 
standing instructions of the teachers of the wards is this : — 

" If persons professing to be members of the Church be 
guilty of allowing drunkenness, Sabbath-breaking, profanity, 
defrauding or backbiting, or any other kind of wickedness 
or unrighteous dealing, they should be visited and their 
wrong-doing pointed out to them in the spirit of brotherly 
kindness and meekness, and be exhorted to repent." 

If they do not repent, they find the respect, then the 
friendship, and finally the association, of their co-religionists 
withheld from them, and thus tacitly ostracized by their 
own Church, they " apostatize " and carry their vices into 
the Gentile camp, and there assist to vilify those who have 
already pronounced them unfit to live with honest men or 
virtuous w^omen. 



1 88 Sinners and Saints, 



CHAPTER XV. 

AT MONROE. 

** Schooling" in the Mormon districts — Innocence as to whisky, but 
connoisseurs in water — " What do you think of that water, sir ? " 
— Gentile dependents on Mormon charity — The one-eyed rooster 
—Notice to All ! 

Sitting at the door next morning, I saw a very trimly- 
dressed damsel of twenty or thereabouts, coming briskly 
along under the trees, which there, as in every other 
Mormon settlement, shade the side-walk. She was the 
schoolmistress, I learned, and very soon her scholars began 
to pass along. I had thus an opportunity of observing the 
curious, happy-go-lucky style in which " schooling " is car- 
ried on, and I was sorry to see it, for Mormonism stands 
urgently in need of more education, and it is pure folly to 
spend half the revenue of the Territory annually in a school 
establishment, if the children and their parents are permitted 
to suppose that education is voluntary and a matter of 
individual whim. Some of the leading members of the 
Church are conspicuous defaulters in this matter, and do 
their families a gross wrong by setting " the chores " and 
education before them as being of equal importance. Even 
in the highest class of the community children go to school 
or stay away almost as they like, and provided a little boy 
or girl has the shrewdness to see that he or she can relieve 
the father or mother from trouble by being at home to run 



Ignormice as to Whisky. 189 

errands and do little jobs about the house, they can, I 
regret to think, regulate the amount of their own schooling 
as they please. I know very well that Utah compares very 
favourably, on paper, with the greater part of America, but 
I have compiled and examined too many educational 
statistics in my time to have any faith in them. 

But in the matter of abstinence from strong drink and 
stimulants, the leaders of the Church set an admirable 
example, and I found it very difficult most of the time, 
and quite impossible part of it, to keep my whisky flask 
replenished. 

My system of arriving at the truth as to the existence of 
spirit stores in any particular settlement, was to grumble 
and complain at having no whisky, and to exaggerate my 
regrets at the absence of beer. The courtesy of my hosts 
was thus challenged, and of the sincerity of the efforts made 
to gratify my barbaric tastes, I could have no doubt what- 
ever. In most cases they were quite ignorant of even the 
cost of liquor, and on one occasion a man started off with a 
five-dollar piece I had given him to get me " five dollars' 
worth of whisky in this bottle," pointing to my flask. I 
explained to him that I only wanted the flask replenished, 
and that there would be change to bring back. He did 
not get any at all, however. 

On one occasion the Bishop brought in, in evident 
triumph, two bottles of beer. On another I went clandes- 
tinely with a Mormon, after dark, and drank some whisky 
" as a friend," and not as a customer, with another Mormon, 
who " generally kept a bottle on hand " for secret con- 
sumption. That they would both have been ashamed for 
their neighbours to know what they were about, I am per- 
fectly convinced. On a third occasion an official brought 
me half a pint of whisky, and the price was a dollar. 



IQO Sinners and Saints. 



Now it is quite impossible for me, who have thus made 
personal experiment, to have any doubt as to the prevailing 
sobriety of these people. I put them repeatedly to the 
severest test that you can apply to a hospitable man, by 
asking point-blank for ardent spirits. Sometimes, in an 
off-hand way, I would give money and the flask to a lad, and 
ask him to " run across to the store and get me a little 
whisky or brandy." He would take both and meander 
round in an aimless sort of way. But I might almost as 
well have asked him to go and buy me a few birds- of- 
paradise or advance sheets of the " Encyclopaedia Britan- 
nica." The father or a neighbour might perhaps suggest a 
" likely " place to get some stimulant, but, as a 7'ule, the 
quest was unconditionally abandoned as hopeless. 

The Elders of the Church set a strict example themselves, 
discouraging, by their own abstinence, indulgence even in 
tea and coffee. You are asked in a settlement whether you 
will have tea or coffee, just as in England you would be 
asked whether you would drink ale or claret. A strong 
man takes a cup of tea as a lady in Europe might take a 
glass of sherry, as justified by unusual exercise and fatigue. 
Being a Londoner, I entertain a most wholesome suspicion 
of water as a drink, and I reverence fresh milk. In rural 
Utah, milk being so abundant, the people think little of it, 
but they pride themselves on their water. 

" What do you think of that water, sir ? " was a question 
that puzzled me to answer at first, for I am not a connois- 
seur in drinking-water. If it had been a claret, I might 
have made a pretence of criticism. But water / Or if they 
had let me wash in it, I would have told them whether I 
thought it " hard " or "soft." But to pass an opinion on a 
particular tumbler of water, as if it were a special brand laid 
down by my host for his own drinking, completely puzzled 



Connoisseurs as to Water, 1 9 1 

me. I can no more tell waters apart than I can tell China- 
men. Of course I can discriminate between the outcome of 
the sea and of sulphur springs. But for the rest, it seems 
to me that they only differ in their degrees of cleanliness, or, 
as scientific men say, to " the properties which they hold in 
solution," that is mud. And mud, I take it, is always pretty 
much the same. 

So at first when my host would suddenly turn to me with, 
"What do you think of that water, sir?" I made the 
mistake of supposing it might be one of the extraordinary 
aqueous novelties for which this territory is so remarkable 
— hot geyser water or petrifying water, or something else of 
the kind— and would smack my lips critically and venture 
on a suggestion of "lime," or " soda," or "alkali." But 
my host was always certain to be down with, " Oh, no ; I 
assure you. That is reckoned the best water in the 
county ! " 

I soon discovered, however, that the right thing to say 
was that I preferred it, " on the whole," to the water at the 
last place. This was invariably satisfactory — unless, of 
course, there was a resident of " the last place " present, 
when an argument would ensue. These people, in fact, 
look upon their drinking-water just as on the continent they 
look upon their vins ordinaires, or in England upon their 
local brews, and to the last I could not help being de- 
lighted at the manner in which a jug of water and tumblers 
were handed about among a party of fatigued and thirsty 
travellers. I always took my share becomingly, but some- 
times, I must confess, with silent forebodings. 

For in some places there are springs which petrify, by 
coating with lime, any substance they flow over, and I did 
not anticipate with any gratification having my throat lined 
with cement, or my stomach faced with building-stone. 



192 Sinners and Samts. 

" Who are those children ? " said I to my host at Munroe, 
pointing to two ragged Httle shoeless waifs that were stand- 
ing in his yard and evidently waiting to be taken notice of. 
Instead of replying, my host turned towards them. 

" Well, Jimmy," said he, " what is it to-day ? " 

The wistful eyes looking out from under the tattered, 
broad-brimmed hats, brightened into intelligence. 

''Another chicken for mother," said both together, 
promptly ; and then, as if suddenly overtaken by a sense of 
their audacity, the forlorn little lads dropped their eyes and 
stood there, holding each other's hands, as picturesque and 
pathetic a pair as any beggar children in Italy. In the full 
sunlight, but half shaded by the immense brims of those 
wonderfully ancient hats, the urchins were irresistibly 
artistic, and if met with anywhere in the Riviera, would 
have been sure of that small-change tribute which the 
romantic tourist pays with such pleasant punctuality to the 
picturesque poverty of Southern childhood. But this was 
in Utah. 

And my host looked at them from under his tilted straw 
hat. They stood in front of him as still as sculptors' models, 
but the fingers and toes kept exchanging little signals of 
nervous distress. 

''All right. Go and get one," said my host suddenly. 
*' Take the young rooster that's blind of one eye." 

He had to shout the last instructions in a rapid crescendo 
as the youngsters had sprung off together at the word " go," 
like twin shafts from those double-arrowed bows of the old 
Manchurian archers. Three minutes later and a most 
woful scrawking heralded the approach of the captors and 
the captive. The young rooster, though blind of one eye, 
saw quite enough of the situation to make him apprehensive, 
but the younger urchin had him tight under his arm, and, 



Ge7itile Beggars, 193 

still under the exciting influences of the chase and capture, 
the boys stood once more before my host, with panting 
bodies, flushed cheeks, and tufts of yellow hair sprouting 
out through crevices of those wondrous old hats, which had 
evidently just seen service in the capture. And the rooster, 
feeling, perhaps, that he was now before the final court of 
appeal, scrawked as if machinery had got loose inside him 
and he couldn't stop it. 

" How's your {scraw-w-w-k) mother?" 

"She's (scraw-w-iu-w-w-k) — and she's {scraw-w-w-k) 
nothing to eat all yesterday." {Scraw-w-k.) 

"Go on home, then." 

And away down the middle of the road scudded the 
little fellows in a confusion of dust and scrawk. 

"Who are those children?" I asked again, thinking I 
had chanced on that unknown thing, a pauper Mormon. 

" Oh," said my host, " he's a bad lot — an outsider — who 
came in here as a loafer, and deserted his wife. She's very 
ill and pretty nigh starving. Ay, she would starve, too, if 
her boys there didn't come round regular, begging of us. 

But loafers know very well that ' those Mormons ' won't 

let anybody go hungry. Ay, and they act as if they knew 
it, too." 

In other settlements there are exactly such similar cases, 
but I would draw the attention of my readers — I wish I 
could draw the attention of the whole nation to it— to the 
following notice which stands to this day with all the force 
of a regular by-law in these Mormon settlements : — 

"Notice to All. 

" If there are any persons in this city who are destitute of 
food, let them be who they may, if they will let their wants 
be known to me, privately or otherwise, I will see that they 

o 



194 Sinners and Saints, 

are furnished with food and lodging until they can provide 
for themselves. The bishops of every ward are to see that 
there are no persons going hungry. 

" (Signed by the Presiding Bishop.)" 

Now it may be mere " sentiment " on my part, but I 
confess that this " Notice to All," in the simplicity of its 
wording, in the nobility of its spirit, reads to me very 
beautifully. And what a contrast to turn from this text of 
a universal charity, that is no respecter of persons, to the 
infinite meanness of those who can write, and pubhsh it 
to the world, of the whole community of Mormons as " the 
villainous spawn of polygamy ! " 

It is a recognized law among the Mormons that no tramp 
shall pass by one of their settlements hungry ; if it is at 
nightfall, he is to be housed. Towards the- Indians their 
policy is one of enlightened and Christian humanity. For 
their own people their charity commences from the first. 
Emigrated to this country by the voluntary donations which 
maintain the "Perpetual Emigration Fund," each new 
arrival is met with immediate care, and being passed on to 
his location, finds (as I have described in another chapter) 
a system of mutual kindliness prevailing which starts him in 
life. If sick, he is cared for. If he dies, his family is 
provided for. All this is fact. I have read it in no books, 
heard it from no hoodwinking elders. My informants are 
lads just arrived in Salt Lake City — within an hour or two 
of their arrival, in fact ; young men just settling down in 
their first log hut in rural settlements : grown men now 
themselves engaged in the neighbourly duty of assisting 
new-comers. 

I have met and talked to those men — Germans, Scandi- 
navians, Britishers— in their own homes here in Utah, and 



Mo7'mon Charity, 195 

have positively assured myself of the fact I state, that 
charity, unquestioning, simple-hearted charity, is one of the 
secrets of the strength of this wonderful fabric of Mormon- 
ism. The Mormons are, more nearly than any other com- 
munity in the world on such a scale, one family. Every 
man knows all the rest of his neighbours with an intimacy 
and a neighbourly interest that is the result of reciprocal 
good services in the past. This is their bond of union. 
In India there is " the village community " which moves, 
though in another arc, on the same plane as the Mormon 
settlement system. There, to touch one man's crop is to 
inflame the whole clan with the sense of a common injury. 
Here it is much the same. And as it is between the 
different individuals in a settlement, so it is between the 
different settlements in the territory. A brutal act, like 
that eviction of the Mormon postmaster at Park City the 
other day, disturbs the whole of Mormonism with appre- 
hensions of impending violence. A libel directed at a man 
or woman in Salt Lake City makes a hundred thousand 
personal enemies in Utah. Now, with what petard will you 
hoist such a rock ? 

Induce these Mormons to hate one another " for all the 
world like Christians," as George Eliot said, and they can be 
snapped as easily as the philosopher's faggots when once 
they were unbundled. But in the meantime abuse of in- 
dividuals or " persecution " of a class simply cements the 
whole body together more firmly than ever. Mutual charity 
is one of the bonds of Mormon union. 



O 2 



196 Sinners a7id Sainh 



CHAPTER XVI. 

JACOB HAMBLIN. 

A Mormon missionary among the Indians— The story of Jacob 
HambHn's life — His spiritualism, the result of an intense faith — 
His good work among the Lamanites — His belief in his own 
miracles. 

Leaving Munroe, we find cultivation gradually disappearing, 
and, after two or three miles, unmitigated brush supervenes. 
A steep divide now thrusts itself across the road, and, 
traversing near the summit a patch of pebbly ground which 
seemed a very paradise for botanists, we descend again into 
a wilderness of grease-wood, "the unspeakable Turk" 
among vegetables. The mountains between which we pass 
provide, however, a succession of fine views. They are of 
that bulky, broad-based and slowly sloping type that is so 
much more solemn and impressive than jagged, sharp- 
pointed and precipitous formations. 

A few miles more bring us to one of them, and for the 
first time during the journey our road runs through the 
thickly growing " cedars " which we have hitherto seen only 
at a distance lying like dark clouds upon the hill-sides and 
black drifts in the gulches. The wild flowers growing under 
these " cedars " (and the pines which are sprinkled among 
them) are of new varieties to me, and I enjoyed a five-mile 
walk in this novel vegetation immensely. A few years ago, 
though, " Mr. Indian " would have made himself too 



Jcuob Hamblin. 197 



interesting to travellers for men to go wandering about 
among the cedars picking posies. They would have found 
those "arrows tipped with jasper," which are so picturesque 
in Hiawatha, flying about instead of humming-birds 
tipped with emerald, and a tomahawk hurtling through the 
bushes would have been more likely to excite remark than 
the blue magpies which I saw looking after snails. 

This district was, until very recently, a favourite hunting- 
ground of those Indians of whom old Jacob Hambhn was 
the Nestor— the guide, philosopher, friend, and victim. 
One day they would try " to fill his skin full of arrows ;" 
on the next day they would be round him, asking him to 
make rain-medicine. They would talk Mormonism with 
him all day, and grunt approvingly ; as soon as night fell 
they would steal his horse. He was always patching up 
peace between this tribe and that, yet every now and then 
they would catch him, have a great pow-wow over him, and 
being unable to decide M^hether he should be simply flayed 
or be roasted first over a charcoal fire, would let him go, 
with provisions and an escort for his home journey. 

His life, indeed, was so wonderful — much more fascinat- 
ing than any fiction — that I am not surprised at his believing, 
as he does, that he is under the special protection of Heaven, 
and, as he says, in a private covenant with the Almighty 
that " if he does not thirst for the blood of the Lamanites, 
his blood shall never be shed by them." He began life as 
a farmer near Chicago, but being baptized received at once 
" the immediate gift of the Holy Ghost," and at once 
entered upon a career of " miracles " and " prophecies " that 
when told in serious earnest are sufficient to stagger even 
Madame Blavatsky herself. He cured his neighbours of 
deadly ailments by the laying on of hands, and foretold 
conversions, deaths, and other events with unvarying accu- 



Sinners and Saints. 



racy. By prolonged private meditation he enjoyed what, 
from his description, must be a pregustation of the Bud- 
dhistic Nirvana, and after this, miracles J^ecame quite com- 
monplace with him. He witnessed the *' miracle " of the 
great quail flights into the camp of the fugitive and starving 
Saints in 1846, and helped to collect the birds and to eat. 
them ', he saw also the " miraculous " flights of seagulls that 
rescued the Mormons from starvation by destroying the 
locusts in 1848. 

But his personal experiences, narrated with a simplicity 
of speech and unquestioning confidence that are bewilder- 
ing, were really marvellous. If cattle were lost, he could 
always dream where they were. If sickness prevailed, he 
knew beforehand who would suffer, and which of them 
would die, and which of them recover. If Indians were 
about, angels gave him in his sleep the first warnings of his 
danger. His sympathy with the Indians was, however, very 
early awakened, and being strengthened in it by the con- 
ciliatory Indian policy of Brigham Young, he became before 
long the only recognized medium of friendly communica- 
tion with them. Everybody, whether Federal ofticials, 
California emigrants. Mormon missionaries, or Indians 
themselves, enlisted his influence whenever trouble with the 
tribes was anticipated. His own explanation of this 
influence is remarkable enough. As a young man, he says, 
he was sometimes told off" to join retributive expeditions,, 
but he could never bring himself to fire at an Indian, and 
on one occasion, when he did try to do so, his rifle kept 
missing fire, while "the Lamanites," with equally ineffectual 
efforts to shed his blood, kept on pincushioning the ground 
all around him with their futile arrows. After this he and 
the Indians whenever they met, spared each other's lives 
with punctual reciprocity.- 



A Mormon Missionary, 199 

On one occasion he dreamed that he was walking in a 
friendly manner with some of the members of a certain 
tribe, when he picked up a piece of a shining substance, 
which stuck to his fingers. The more he tried to rub it 
off the brighter it became. One would naturally, under 
such circumstances, anticipate the revelation of a gold-mine, 
but Jacob Hamblin, without any questioning, went off at 
once to the tribe in question. They received him as 
friends, and he stayed with them. One day, passing a 
lodge, "the Spirit" whispered to him, " Here is the shining 
substance you saw in your dream." But all he saw was a 
squaw and a boy papoose. However, he went up to the 
squaw, and asked for the boy. She naturally demurred to 
the request, but to her astonishment the boy, gathering up 
his bow and arrows, urged compliance with it, and Hamblin 
eventually led off his dream-revealed "lump." After a 
while he asked the boy how it was he was so eager to 
come, though he had never seen a white man before, and 
the boy answered, " My Spirit told me that you were 
coming to my father's lodge for me on a certain day, and 
that I was to go with you, and when the day came I went 
out to the edge of the wood, and lit a fire to show you the 
way to me." And Hamblin then remembered that it was 
the smoke of a fire that had led him to that particular 
camp, instead of another towards which he had intended 
riding ! 

By way of a parenthesis, let me remark here that if there 
are any " Spiritualists " among my readers, they should 
study Mormonism. The Saints have long ago formulated 
into accepted doctrines those mysteries of the occult world 
which Spiritualists outside the faith are still investigating. 
Your " problems " are their axioms. 

This Indian boy became a staunch Mormon, and to the 



200 Sinners and Saints, 

last was in communion with the other world. Remember 
I am quoting Hamblin's words, not in any way endorsing 
them. In 1863 he was at St. George, and one day when 
his friends were starting on a mission to a neighbouring 
tribe, he took farewell of them "for ever." "I am going 
on a mission,, too," he said. "What do you mean ? " asked 
Hamblin. " Only that I shall be dead before you come 
back," was the Indian's reply. " I have seen myself in a 
dream preaching the gospel to a multitude of my people, 
and my ancestors were among them. So I know that I 
must be a spirit too before I can carry the Word to 
spirits." In six weeks Hamblin returned to St. George ; 
and the Indian was dead. 

Brigham Young, as I have said, insisted upon a concilia- 
tory policy towards the Indians. He made in person 
repeated visits to the missions at work among them, and 
was never weary of advising and encouraging. Here is a 
portion of one of his letters : does it read like the words 
of a thoroughly bad man ? — " Seek by words of righteous-, 
ness to obtain the love and confidence of the tribes. Omit 
promises where you are not sure you can fulfil them. Seek 
to unite your hearts in the bonds of love. . . . May 
the Spirit of the Lord direct you, and that He may qualify 
you for every duty is the constant prayer of your fellow- 
labourer in the gospel of salvation, Brigham Young." Here 
is a part of another letter: "I trust that the genial and 
salutary influences now so rapidly extending to the various 
tribes, may continue till it reaches every son and daughter 
of Abraham in their fallen condition. The hour of their 
redemption draws nigh, and the time is not far off when 
they shall become a people whom the Lord will bless. 
. . . The Indians should be encouraged to keep and 
take care of stock. I highly approve of your design in 



Hamblins Influence over Indians, 201 

doing your farming through the natives ; it teaches them to 
obtain a subsistence by their own industry, and leaves you 
more Hberty to extend your labours among others. . . . 
You should always be careful to impress upon them that 
they should not infringe on the rights of others, and our 
brethren should be very careful not to infringe upon their 
rights in any particular, thus cultivating honour and good 
principles in their midst by example as well as by precept. 
As ever, your brother in the gospel of salvation, Brigham 
Young." 

These and other letters are exactly in the spirit of the 
correspondence which, in the early days of England in 
Hindostan, won for the old Court of Directors the eternal 
admiration of mankind and for England the respect of 
Asia. Yet in Brigham Young's case is it ever carried to 
his credit that he spent so much thought and time and 
labour over the reclamation of the Indians, by a policy of 
kindness, and their exaltation by an example of honourable 
dealing ? 

It was in this spirit that the Moimon missionaries went 
out to the Indians then living in the part of the Territory over 
w^hich I travelled, and Jacob Hamblin was one eminently 
characteristic of the type. Beyond all others, however, he 
sympathized with the red man's nature. " I argue with 
him just as he argues," he said. He was on good terms 
with the medicine- men, and took a delightful interest in 
their ceremonies. But when they failed to bring rain with 
bonfires and howling, he used to pray down abundant 
showers ; when they gave up tormenting the sick as past 
all hope, Hamblin restored the invalid to life by the laying 
on of hands ! 

Once more let me say that I am only quoting, not 
indorsing. But I do him a great injustice in not being able 



202 Sinners and Saints. 

to convey in writing the impressive simplicity of his 
language, his low, measured tones, his contemplative, 
earnest attitude, his Indian-like gravity of countenance. 
That he speaks the implicit truth, according to his own 
belief, I am as certain as that the water of the Great Salt 
Lake is salt. 

His "occult" sympathies seemed at times to be magnetic, 
for when in doubt as to whom to choose for his companion 
on a perilous journey, some brother or other, the fittest 
person for the occasion, would always feel mysteriously 
influenced to go to him to see if his services were 
needed. His displeasure killed men, that is to say they 
went from his presence, sickened and died. So frequent 
was this inexplicable demise that the Indians worked out a 
superstition that evil befalls those who rob or kill a Mormon ; 
and so marked were the special manifestations of the mis- 
sionaries' spirit power, that, as Hamblin says, " the Indians 
were without excuse for refusing conversion," and were 
converted. " They looked to us for counsel, and learned to 
regard our words as law." Though the missionaries were 
sometimes alone, and the tribes around them of the most 
desperate kind, as " plundersome " as wolves and at per- 
petual blood-feud with each other, the Mormons' lives were 
quite safe. When they had determined on an atrocity — 
burning a squaw, for instance — they would do it in the most 
nervous hurry, lest a Mormon should come along and stop 
it, and when they had done it and were reproached, they 
used to cry like children, and say they were only Indians. 

Tragedy and comedy went hand in hand ; laughter at the 
ludicrous is cut short by a shudder of horror. " We can- 
not be good ; we must be Piutes. Perhaps some of our 
children will be good. We're going off to kill so-and-so. 
Whoop ! " And away they would go, putting an arrow into 



Hamblins Belief in his own Miracles, 203 

the missionary's horse as they passed. By-and-by the man 
who shot the arrow would be found dead, killed by a 
Mormon's curse, and the rest would be back at work in 
the settlement hoeing pumpkins — "for all the world like 
Christians ! " Through all these alternations of temper and 
fortune, Jacob HambHn retained his tender sympathy with 
the red men. 

Their superstitious piety which, quaintly enough, he does 
not seem to think is exactly like his own, attracted him. 
Ke found among them tribes asking the blessing of the 
Great Father on their food before they ate it ; invoking the 
Divine protection on behalf of their visitors ; praying for 
protection when about to cross a river; returning thanks 
for a safe return from a journey ; always sending one of 
their religious men to accompany any party about to travel, 
and so on. All this the pious Mormon naturally respected. 
But over and above these more ordinary expressions of 
piety, he found tribes that believed in and acted upon 
dreams ; that accepted the guidance of " second sight ; " 
that relied upon prayer for obtaining temporal necessaries ; 
that lived " by faith," and were awaiting the fulfilment of 
prophecy. In all this the Mormon missionary sees nothing 
but common sense. For instance, Hamblin said, " I know 
that some people do not believe in dreams and night-visions. 
I myself do not believe in them when they arise from a 
disordered stomach, but in other kinds I have been fore- 
warned of coming events, and received much instruction ! " 
And, in the spirit of these words, he thinks it the most 
natural thing in the world that Indians should start off after 
a dream and find their lost cattle ; suddenly alter their course 
in a waterless journey, and come upon hitherto unknown 
springs ; predict the most impossible meetings with friends, 
and avoid dangers that were not even anticipated. In the 



204 Sinners and Saints. 

most serious manner possible, he acquiesces in the Indians' 
theory of rain-getting, and acts upon their clairvoyant advice. 
" The Lord," he says, " is mindful of the prayers of these 
poor barbarians, and answers them with the blessings they 
need." Seeing them quite sincere in their faith, he joins 
them in their ceremonies of scattering consecrated meal to 
ensure protection on a journey, believing himself that 
simple reliance on Providence is all that men of honest 
lives need. 

One tribe has a tradition that three prophets are to come 
to lead them back to the lands that their fathers once 
possessed, that these are to be preceded by good white 
men, but that the Indians are not to go with them until 
after the three prophets have reappeared and told them 
what to do. The Indians accept the Mormons as " the 
good white men " of the tradition, but " the three prophets " 
not having reappeared, they refuse to leave their villages (as 
the Mormons have wanted them to do), and Hamblin has 
not a word to say against such "reasonable" objec- 
tions. 

Is it not wonderful to find men thus reverting to an 
intellectual type that j;he world had supposed to be extinct ? 
to find men, ' shrewd in business, honest in every phase 
of temporal life, going back to cheiromancy and hydro- 
mancy, and transacting temporal affairs at the guidance of 
visions ? An Indian prays for rain on his pumpkins, in 
apparently the most unreasonable way, but the Mormon 
postpones his departure till the rain that results is over. 
On his way he nearly dies of thirst, prays for deliverance, 
and in half an hour snow falls over a mile and a half of 
ground, melts and forms pools of water ! What are we to 
say of men who say such thmgs as these ? Are they all 
crazy together? And what shall we think of the thousands 



The Red-man's Traditions. 205 



here who believe that miracles are the most ordinary, 
reasonable, natural, every-day phenomena of a Hfe of faith, 
and quote point-blank the promises of the New Testament 
as a sufficient explanation ? The best thing, perhaps, is to 
say Hum meditatively, and think no more about it. 



2o6 Sinners and Saints, 



CHAPTER XVII. 

THROUGH MARYSVALE TO KINGSTON. 

Piute County — Days of small things — A swop in the sage-brush ; two 
Bishops for one Apostle — The Kings of Kingston — A failure in 
Family Communism. 

From the brow of the cedared hill south of Munroe a 
splendid view is obtained, and Piute County opens with fair 
promises ; for a superb-looking valley, all natural meadow, 
lies spread out on either side of the Sevier, while from a 
gulch in the mountains on the right, a stream of vegeta- 
tion seems to have poured down across the level, carrying 
along with its flood of cotton-wood and willow a few 
stately old pine-trees. From among the vegetation 
peeps out a cluster of miners' houses — for there are the 
Sevier mines up beyond that pine gulch — and a ranch or 
two. Much of the enchantment of distance vanishes of 
course as we come down to the level of the plains ourselves 
and skirt it close under the hills on the left. But it is a fine 
location nevertheless, and some day, no doubt, may be a 
populous valley. After a mile or two it narrows, and we 
cross the river — a wooden bridge, with a store and barns — 
(" Lisonbee's place ") making a pleasant interval of civili- 
zation. 

From " Lisonbee's " the road passes up on to and over a 
stony plateau, and then descends into the valley again. 



Days of Small Things, 207 



Cattle and horses are grazing in the meadow, and the dark 
patches of wire-grass are spangled with yellow lupins, and 
tinted pink in places with patches of a beautiful orchid-like 
flower. On the edge of this pleasant-looking tract stand 
two small cottages, and to one of these we are welcomed 
by its Mormon occupants. To me the whole country had 
an aspect of desperate desolation. Yet our host had just 
come back from "the Post;" his children were away "at 
school ;" the newspaper on his table was the latest we had 
ourselves seen. It is true that the post was literally a post, 
with a cigar-box nailed on the top of it. standing all by 
itself among the brushwood on the roadside. The school 
was a mile or two off, "just over the hill," and, till the 
regular teacher came, a volunteer was making shift to impart 
education to the little scholars who came straggling over 
the dreary hill-sides by twos and threes. Yet, rudimentary 
though they be, these are the first symptoms of a civilization 
triumphing over sage-brush, and give even to such despe- 
rately small beginnings a significance that is very interesting. 
All the thriving settlements I have visited began exactly in 
the same way— and under worse conditions, too, for the 
Indian was then a stronger power than the Mormon. 

Our host here had shot among the reeds in his meadow a 
large bird, the size of an average goose, black with white 
spots, which he had been told was "a loon." It was one of 
the larger " divers," its neck being very long and snake-like, 
terminating in a comparatively small head, its wings very 
short and its legs (the feet webbed) set, as in all diving birds, 
far back on the body. 

Leaving this very young "settlement," we found our- 
selves again in a wretched, waterless country, where the 
vegetation did not compensate for its monotony by any 
attractions of colour, nor the mountains for their baldness 



2o8 Sinners and Saints, 

by any variety of contour. Here and there stunted cedars 
had huddled together for company into a gulch, as if afraid 
to be scattered about singly on such lonesome hill-sides, and 
away on the right, in a dip under the hills, we caught a 
glimpse of Marysvale. 

Traversing this forbidding tract, we met another waggon 
on its way to Munroe, and stopping to exchange greetings, 
it suddenly occurred to one of the strangers that by our 
exchanging vehicles the horses and their teamsters would 
both be going home instead of away from it, and thus 
everybody be advantaged ! The exchange was accordingly 
effected, our teamster getting two Bishops in exchange for 
an Apostle and a correspondent, and the waggons being 
turned round in their tracks, the teams, to their uncon- 
cealed satisfaction, started off towards their respective 
homes. 

Sage-brush and sand, with occasional patches of tiresome 
rock fragments and unlimited lizards— nature's hieroglyphics 
for sultry sterility — were the only features of the journey. 
Away on our left, however, the track of a water-channel, 
that when completed will turn many thousands of these arid 
acres into farm-lands, scarred the red hill- side, and told the 
same old story of Mormon industry. Where it came from 
I have forgotten, where it was going to I do not remember, 
but it was in sight off and on for some thirty miles, and was 
probably carrying the waters of the Sevier on to the Circle- 
ville plains. 

We are there ourselves in the evening, and passing through 
some ploughed land and meadow, find ourselves upon the 
wind-swept, lonesome, location of 

The Kings of Kingston. > 

Among the social experiments of Mormonism, the family 



The Kings of Ki^igston. 209 

communism of the Kings of Kingston deserves a special 
notice, for, though in my own opinion it is a failure, both 
financially and socially, the scheme is probably one of the 
most curious attempts at solving a great social problem that 
was ever made. 

Kingston is the name of a hamlet of fifteen wooden 
cottages and a stock-yard which has been planted in the 
centre of one of the most desolate plains in all the Utah 
Territory — a very Jehunnam of a plain. Piute County, in 
which it is situated, is, as a rule, a most forbidding section of 
country, and the Kingston " Valley " is perhaps the dreariest 
spot in it. The mountains, stern and sterile, ring it in com- 
pletely, but on the south-east is a great canon which might 
be the very mouth of the cavern in which the gods used to 
keep their winds, for a persistent, malignant wind is per- 
petually sweeping through it on to the plain below, and the 
soil being light and sandy, the people live for part of the year 
in a ceaseless dust-storm. One year they sowed 300 acres with 
wheat, and the wind simply blew the crop away. That 
which it could not actually displace, it kept rubbed down 
close to the ground by the perpetual passage of waves of 
sand. They planted an orchard, but some gooseberry 
bushes are the only remaining vestiges of the plantation, 
and even these happen to be on the lee side of a solid 
fence. They also set out trees to shade their houses, but 
the wind worked the saplings round and round in their 
holes, so that they could not take root. It can be easily 
imagined, therefore, that without a tree, without a green 
thing except the reach of meadow land at the foot of the 
hills, the Kingston plain, with its forlorn fifteen tenements, 
looks for most of the year desolation itself. That any one 
should ever have settled there is a mystery to all ; that he 
should have revtained there is a simple absurdity, a very 

P 



2 1 o Sinners and Saints. 



Jumbo of a folly. Yet here, after five years of the most- 
dismal experiences, I found some twenty households in 
occupation. 

At the time when Brigham Young was exerting himself to 
extend the " United Order " (of which more when I come 
to Orderville), one of the enthusiasts who embraced its 
principles was a Mr. King, of Fillmore. He was a pros- 
perous man, with a family well settled about him. Never- 
theless, he determined from motives of religious philanthropy 
to begin life anew, and having sold off all that he possessed he 
emigrated with his entire family into the miserable Piute 
country, selected in an hour of infatuation the Kingston — 
then " Circleville " — location, and announced that he was 
about to start a co-operative experiment in farming and 
general industry on the basis of a household, with patri- 
archal government, a purse in common, and a common 
table for all to eat at together. 

Having been permitted to examine the original articles of 
enrolment, dated May i, 1877— a document, by the way, 
curiously characteristic of the whole undertaking, being a 
jumble of articles and by-laws written on a few slips of 
ordinary paper, a miracle of unworldly simplicity and in 
very indifferent spelling — I found the objects of "the 
company," as it is called, were " agricultural, manufacturing, 
commercial, and other industrial pursuits," and the establish- 
ment and maintenance of "colleges, seminaries, churches, 
libraries, and any other charitable or scientific association^.'' 
It was to be superintended by a Board, who were to be 
elected by a majority of the members, and to receive for their 
services " the same wages as are paid to farm hands or 
other common labourers." 

To become members of this Family Order it was neces- 
sary that they should " bequeath, transfer, and convey into 



A Family Co7ir}iiiny, 2 1 1 

the company all their right, title, and interest to whatever 
property, whether personal or real estate, that they were 
then possessed of, or might hereafter become possessed of 
by legacy, will, or otherwise for the purposes above men- 
tioned, and further that they would labour faithfully and 
honourably themselves, and cause their children who were 
under age to labour under the direction of the Board of 
Directors, the remuneration for which shall be as fixed by the 
board both as to price and kind of pay he or she shall 
receive." It was "furthermore understood and agreed that 
a schedule or inventory of all property bequeathed or trans- 
ferred to the company should be kept, together with the 
price of each article, that in case any party becomes dis- 
satisfied or is called away, or wishes to draw out, he can 
have as near as may be the same kind of property, but in no 
case can he have real estate, only at the option of the 
Board, nor shall interest or a dividend be paid on such 
property." 

" We further agree " (so run the articles of this curious 
incorporation) " that we will be controlled and guided in all 
our labour, in our Tood, clothing, and habitations for our 
families " (by the Board), " being frugal and economical in 
our manner of living and dress, and in no case seek to 
obtain that which is above another." 

" We also covenant and agree that all credits for labour 
that stand to our names in excess of debits for food and 
clothing, shall become the property of the company." 

In these four articles is contained the whole of the 
principles of this astonishing experiment. Men were to 
sell their all, and put the proceeds into a family fund. 
Out of this, as the wages of their labour, they were to 
receive food and other necessaries to the value of $1 a 
day, and if at the end of the year their drawings exceeded 

p 2 



212 Sinners and Saints, 

the amount of work put in the company " forgave " them 
the excess, while if their earnings exceeded their drawings, 
they " forgave " the company. Thus the accounts were 
annually squared by reciprocal accommodation. 

If any one seceded from the Order, he was entitled to receive 
back exactly what he had contributed. Mr. King, the father, 
started by putting in some $20,000, and his sons and 
others following suit, the fund rose at once to some §40,000. 
(I would say here that the entirely original method of 
" keeping the books " makes balance-striking a difficulty. ) 
With this sum, and so much labour at their disposal, the 
Family Company should have been a brilliant success. But 
several circumstances conspired disastrously against it. 
The first was the unfortunate selection of location, for, in 
spite of the quantity of promising land available elsewhere, 
Mr. King pitched his camp in the wretched sand-drifts of 
the Piute section. The next was the ill-advised generosity 
of the founders in inviting all the country round to come 
and join them, with or without means, so long as they 
would be faithful members of the Order. The result, of 
course, was an influx of " deadheads "—the company in- 
deed having actually to send out waggons to haul in 
families who were too poor to be able to move themselves. 
Of these new-comers only a proportion were worth any- 
thing to the young settlement, for many came in simply 
for the certainty of a roof over their heads and sufficient 
food. The result was most discouraging, and in a short 
time the more valuable adherents were disheartened, and 
began to fall off, and now, five years from the establish- 
ment of the company, there are only some twenty famiUes 
left, and these are all Kings or relatives of the Kings. 
The father himself is dead, but four sons divide the 
patriarchal government 'between them, and, having again 



Self' Sacrifice, 213 



reduced the scheme to a strictly family concern, they are 
thinking of a fresh start. 

What may happen in the future is not altogether certain, 
but it will be strange if in this country where individual 
industry, starting without a dollar, is certain of a com- 
petence, co-operative labour commencing with funds in 
hand does not achieve success. At present the company 
possesses, besides its land in the valley, and a mill and 
a woollen factory, both commencing work, cattle and sheep 
worth about $t 0,000, and horses worth some $12,000 
more. This is a tolerable capital for an association of 
hard-working men to begin with, but it is significant of 
errors in the past that after five years of almost superhuman 
toil they should find themselves no better off materially 
than when they started. Nor, socially, has the experiment 
hitherto been a success, for Kingston is, in my opinion, 
beyond comparison the lowest in the scale of all the 
Mormon settlements that I have seen. It is poverty- 
stricken in appearance; its houses outside and inside 
testify, in unmended windows and falling plaster, to an 
absence of that good order which characterizes so many 
other villages. The furniture of the rooms and the quaHty 
of the food on the tables are poorer than elsewhere, and 
altogether it is only too evident that this family communism 
has dragged all down alike to the level of the poorest and 
the laziest of its advocates, rather than raised all up to the 
level of the best off and the hardest working. The good 
men have sunk, the others have not risen, and if it were 
not so pathetic the^ Kingston phenomenon would be 
exasperating. 

But there is a very sincere pathos about this terrible 
sacrifice of self for the common good. I do not mean 
theoretically, but practically. The men of " the company " 



214 Sin7iers and Saints, 

are the most saddening community I have ever visited. 
They seem, with their gentle manners, wonderful simplicity 
of speech, and almost womanly solicitude for the welfare of 
their guests, to have lost the strong, hearty spirit which 
characterizes these Western conquerors of the deserts. 
Yet even the hard-working Mormons speak of them as 
veritable heroes in work. It is a common thing to hear 
men say that " the Kingston men are simply killing them- 
selves with toil ;" and when Western men talk of work 
as being too hard, you may rely upon it it is something 
very exceptional. Almost against hope these peasants have 
struggled with difficulties that even they themselves confess 
seem insuperable. They have given Nature all the odds 
they could, and then gone on fighting her. The result 
has been what is seen to-day — a crushed community of 
men and enfeebled women, living worse than any other 
settlement on the whole Mormon line. Their own stout 
hearts refuse to believe that they are a failure; but failure 
is written in large capital letters on the whole hamlet, and 
in italics upon every face within it. The wind-swept sand- 
drifts in which the settlement stands, the wretchedness 
of the tenements and their surroundings, the haj^hazard 
composition of their food, their black beans and their 
buffalo berries, the whistling of the wind as it drives the 
sand through the boards of the houses, the howling of the 
coyotes round the stock-yard— everything from first to last 
was in accord to emphasize the desperate desolation. But 
those who have known them for all the five years that the 
experiment has been under trial declare that their present 
condition, lamentable as it is, is an improvement upon 
their past. When they ate at a common table, the living, 
it is said, was even more frugal than it is now, and there 
was hardly a piece of crockery among them all, the 



A Social Failure, 215 

"family" eating and drinking out of tin vessels. The 
wpmen, either from mismanagement among themselves, or 
want of order among the men, were unable to bear the 
burden of ceaseless cooking, and the common table was 
thereupon abandoned by a unanimous vote. 

Yet they are courtesy and hospitality itself, and their 
sufferings have only clinched their piety. They have not 
lost one iota of their faith in their principles, though 
staggering under the conviction of failure. Their children 
have regular schooUng, the women are scrupulously neat 
in their dress, while profanity and intemperance are un- 
known. 



2i6 Sinners and Saints, 



CHAPTER XYIII. 

FROM KINGSTON TO ORDERVILLE. 

On the way to Panguitch — Section-houses not Mormon homes — 
Through wild country — Panguitch and its fish — Forbidden plea- 
sures—At the source of the Rio Virgin — The surpassing beauty of 
Long Valley — The Orderville Brethren — A success in Family 
Communism. 

Next day we started over the hills for Panguitch, some forty 
miles off. And here, by the roadside, was pointed out to 
me one of those " section-houses " which a traveller in 
Utah once mistook for Mormon " homes," and described 
as " cabins, ten feet by six, built of planks, one window 
with no glass in it, one doorway with no door in it." This 
is an accurate description enough of a section-house, but it 
is a mistake to suppose that any one ever Hves in it, as 
section-houses are only put up to comply with the Home- 
stead Act, which stipulates for a building with one doorway 
and one window being erected upon each lot within a 
certain period of its allotment. But they do duty all the 
same in a certain class of literature as typical of the squalid 
depravity of the Mormons, for, being inhabited by Mormons, 
it follows, of course, that several wives, to say nothing of 
numerous children, have all to sleep together " on the floor 
of the single room the house contains ! " Isn't this a 
dreadful picture ! And are not these large polygamous 
families who live in section-houses a disgrace to America ? 



Through Rural Scenes, 2 1 7 

But, unfortunately for this telling picture, the only " inhabi- 
tants " of these section-houses are Gentile tramps. 

A rough hill-road, strewn with uncompromising rocks, 
jolted us for some miles, and then we crossed a stream- 
bed with some fine old pines standing in it, and beds of 
blue lupins brightening.the margin, and so came down to the 
river level, and along a lane running between hedges of wild- 
rose and redberry (the " opie " of the Indians) tangled with 
clematis and honeysuckle, and haunted by many birds and 
brilliant butterflies. The river bubbled along among thickets 
of golden currant and red willow, and mallards with russet 
heads floated in the quiet backwaters, by the side of their 
dames all dressed in dainty grey. It was altogether a 
charming passage in a day of such general dreariness, re- 
minding one of a pleasant quotation from some pretty po^m 
in the middle of a dull chapter by some prosy writer. 

But the dulness recommences, and then we find ourselves 
at a wayside farm, where a couple of fawns with bells round 
their necks are keeping the calves company, and some boys 
are fishing on a little log bridge. These fish must have 
been all born idiots, or been stricken with unanimous lunacy 
in early youth, for the manner of their capture was this. 
The angler lay on his stomach on the " bridge " (it was a 
three foot and a half stream), with one eye down between 
two of the logs. When he saw any fish he thrust his " rod " 
—it was more like a penholder — through the space, and held 
it in front of the fishes' noses. At the end of the rod were 
some six inches of string, with a hook tied on with a large 
knot, and baited with a dab of dough. When the fish had 
got thoroughly interested in the dough, the angler would 
jerk up his rod, and by some unaccountable oversight on 
the part of the fishes it was found that about once in fifty 



2 1 8 Sinners and Saints, 

jerks a fish came up out of the water ! They seemed to me 
to be young trout ; but, whatever the species, they must 
have been the most imbecile of finned things. I suggested 
catching them with the finger and thumb, but the boys 
giggled at me, as " the fish wouldn't let ye." But I am of a 
different opinion, for it seemed to me that fish that would 
let you catch them with such apparatus, would let you 
catch them without any at all. 

From here to Panguitch the road lies through stony 
country of the prevalent exasperating type until we reach 
the precincts of the settlement, heralded long before we 
reach it by miles of fencing that enclose the grazing-land 
stretching down to the river. A detestable road, broken up 
and swamped by irrigation channels, leads into the settle- 
ment, and the poor impression thus received is not removed 
as we pass through the treeless " streets " and among the 
unfenced lots. But it is an interesting spot none the less, 
for apart from its future, it is a good starting-point for many 
places of interest. But I should like to have visited Red 
Lake and Panguitch Lake. " Panguitch," by the way, 
means "fish" in the red man's language, and it is no 
wonder, therefore, that at breakfast we enjoyed one of the 
most splendid dishes of mountain-lake trout that was ever 
set before man. It is a great fish certainly— and I prefer it 
broiled. To put any sauce to it is sheer infamy. 

The beaver, by the way, is still to be trapped here, and 
the grizzly bear is not a stranger to Panguitch. 

Looking out of the window in the evening, I saw a cart 
standing by the roadside, and a number of men round it. 
Their demeanour aroused my curiosity, for an extreme 
dejection had evidently marked them for its own. Some 
sate in the road as if waiting in despair for Doomsday; 
others prowled round the cart and leant in a melancholy 



A beaMtiftd Valley, 219 

The cart, it appeared, had come from 
St. George, the vine-growing district in the south of the 
territory, and contained a cask of wine. But as there was 
no licence in Panguitch for the sale of liquors, it could not 
be broached ! I never saw men look so wretchedly thirsty 
in my life, and if glaring at the cask and thumping it could 
have emptied it, there would not have been a drop left. It 
was a delightful improvement upon the tortures of Tantalus, 
but the victims accepted the joke as being against them, 
and though they watched the cart going away gloomily 
enough, there was no ill-temper. 

From Panguitch to Orderville, fifty miles, the scenery 
opens with the dreary hills that had become so miserably 
familiar, alternating with level pasture-lands, among which 
the serpentine Sevier winds a curiously fantastic course. 
But gradually there grows upon the mind a sense of coming 
change. Verdure creeps over the plains, and vegetation 
steals on to the hill-sides, and then suddenly as if for a 
surprise, the complete beauty of Long Valley bursts upon 
the traveller. I cannot in a few words say more of it than 
that this valley — through which the Rio Virgin flows, and 
in which the Family Communists of Orderville have pitched 
their tents — rivals in its beauty the scenery of Cashmere. 

Springing from a hill-side, beautiful with flowering shrubs 
and instinct with bird life, the Virgin River trickles through 
a deep meadow bright with blue iris plants and walled in on 
either side by hills that are clothed with exquisite vegetation, 
and then, collecting its young waters into a little channel, 
breaks away prattling into the valley. Corn-fields and 
orchards, and meadows filled with grazing kine, succeed 
each other in pleasant series, and on the right hand and on 
the left the mountains lean proudly back with their loads of 
magnificent pine. And other springs come tumbling down 



220 Smne7^s and Saints. 



to join the pretty river, which flows on, gradually widening 
as it goes, past whirring saw-mills and dairies half buried 
among fruit-trees, through park-like glades studded with 
pines of splendid girth, and pretty brakes of berry-bearing 
trees all flushed with blossoms. And the valley opens away 
on either side into grassy glens from which the tinkle of 
cattle-bells falls pleasantly on the ear, or into bold canons 
that are draped close with sombre pines, and end in the 
most magnificent cathedral clifls of ruddy sandstone. 

What lovely bits of landscape ! What noble studies of 
rock architecture ! It is a very panorama of charms, and, 
travelled widely as I have, I must confess to an absolute 
novelty of delight in this exquisite valley of 

The Orderville Brethren. 

Among the projects which occupied Joseph Smith's active 
brain was one that should make the whole of the Mormon 
community a single family, with a purse in common, and the 
head of the Church its head. In theory they are so already. 
But Joseph Smith hoped to see them so in actual practice 
also, and for this purpose — the establishment of a universal 
family communism— he instituted "The Order of Enoch," 
or " The United Order." 

Why Enoch? The Mormons themselves appear to have 
no definite explanation beyond the fact that Enoch was holy 
beyond all his generation. But for myself, I see in it only 
another instance of that curious sympathy with ancient 
tradition which Joseph Smith, and after him Brigham 
Young, so consistently showed. They were both of them 
as ignorant as men could be in the knowledge that comes 
from books, and yet each of them must have had some 
acquaintance with the mystic institutions of antiquity, or 
their frequent coincidence with primitive ideas and schemes 



Among the Orderville B^^ethren. 221 

appears to me inexplicable. No man can in these days 
think and act like an antediluvian by accident. Josephus 
is, I find, a favourite author among the Mormons, and 
Josephus may account for a little. Moreover, many of the 
Mormons, notably both Presidents, are or were Freemasons, 
and this may account for some more. But for the balance 
I can find no explanation. Now I remember reading 
somewhere — perhaps in Sir Thomas Browne — that "the 
patriarchal Order of Enoch " is an institution of prodigious 
antiquity ; that Enoch in the Hebrew means " the teacher;" 
that he was accepted in prehistoric days as the founder of a 
self-supporting, pious socialism, which was destined (should 
destruction overtake the world) to rescue one family at any 
rate from the general ruin, and perpetuate the accumulated 
knowledge of the past. And it is exactly upon these con- 
ditions that we find Joseph Smith, fifty years ago, promul- 
gating in a series of formulated rules, the scheme of a 
patriarchal " Order of Enoch." 

All Mormons are " elect." But even among the elect 
there is an aristocracy of piety. Thus in Islam we find the 
Hajji faithful above the faithful. In Hindooism the brother- 
hood of the Coolins is accepted by the gods above all the other 
" twice-born." Is it not, indeed, the same in every religion 
— that there are the chosen within the chosen — "though 
they were mighty men, yet they were not of the three " — a 
tenth legion among the soldiers of Heaven — the arc/iangds 
in the select ministry of the Supreme ? In Mormonism, 
therefore, if a man chooses, he may consecrate himself to his 
faith more signally than his fellows, by endowing the Church 
with all his goods, and accepting from the Church after- 
wards the " stewardship " of a portion of his own property ! 
It is no mere lip-consecration, no Ritualists' " Order of 
Jesus," no question of a phylactery. It means the absolute 



2 2 2 Sin ners and Sa in ts, 

transfer of all property and temporal interests, and of all 
rights of all kinds therein, to the Church by a formal, legal 
process, and a duly attested deed. Here is one : — 

" Be it known by these presents, that I, Jesse W. Fox, of 
Great Salt Lake City, in the county of Great Salt Lake, and 
territory of Utah, for and in consideration of the sum of one 
hundred ($ioo) dollars and the good-will which I have to 
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, give and 
convey unto Brigham Young, trustee in trust for the said 
Church, his successor in office and assigns, all my claims to 
and ownership of the following- described property, to wit : 

One house and lot $1000 

One city lot ..... . 100 

East half of lot i, block 12 . . . 50 

Lot I, block 14 75 

Two cows, $50 ; two calves, $15 . . 65 

One mare, J^ioo; one colt, $50 . . 150 

One watch, $20; one clock, $12 . , 32 

Clothing, $300; beds and bedding, $125 . 425 

One stove, $20 ; household furniture, $210 230 



Total $2127 

together with all the rights, privileges, and appurtenances 
thereunto belonging or appertaining. I also covenant and 
agree that I am the lawful claimant and owner of said 
property, and will warrant and for ever defend the same 
unto the said trustee in trust, his successor in office and 
assigns, against the claims of my heirs, assigns, or any person 
whomsoever." 

Then follows the attestation of the witness, and the formal 
certificate of the Judge of the Probate Court that "the 
signer of the above transfer, personally known to me, 



The Order of Enoch, 223 

appeared the second day of April, 1857, and acknowledged 
that he, of his own choice, executed the foregoing transfer " 

Such transfers of property are not, I know, infrequent in 
other religions, notably the Roman Catholic, but the object 
of the Mormon's piety distinguishes his act from that of 
others. Had Brigham Young persevered in his prede- 
cessor's project, it is almost certain that he would have 
established a gigantic " company " that would have controlled 
all the temporal interests of the territory, and eventually 
comprised the whole Mormon population. It is just pos- 
sible that he himself foresaw that such success would be 
ruin ; that the foundations of the Order would sink under 
such a prodigious superstructure, for he diverted his atten- 
tion from the main to subsidiary schemes. Instead of one 
central organization sending out colonies on all sides of it, he 
advised the establishment of branch communities, which 
might eventually be gathered together under a single head- 
quarters' control. The two projects were the same as to 
results ; they differed only as to the means ; and the second 
was the more judicious. 

A few individuals came forward in their enthusiasm to 
give all they possessed to a common cause, but the Order 
flagged, though, nominally, many joined it. Thus, travelling 
through the settlements, I have seen in a considerable 
number of homes the Rules of the Order framed upon the 
walls. At any time these would be curious ; to-day^ when 
the morality of the principles of Mormonism is challenged, 
they are of special interest : — 

" Rules that should be observed by Members of the 
United Order. 
" We will not take the name of the Deity in vain, nor speak 
lightly of His character or of sacred things. 



224 Sinners and Saints » 

" We will pray with our families morning and evening, and 
also attend to secret prayer. 

" We will observe and keep the Word of Wisdom accord- 
ing to the spirit and the meaning thereof. 

" We will treat our families with due kindness and affection, 
and set before them an example worthy of imitation. In 
our families and intercourse with all persons, we will refrain 
from being contentious or quarrelsome, and we will cease 
to speak evil of each other, and will cultivate a spirit of 
charity towards all. We consider it our duty to keep from 
acting selfishly or from covetous motives, and will seek the 
interest of each other and the salvation of all man- 
kind. 

" We will observe the Sabbath day to keep it holy, in 
accordance with the Revelations. 

" That which is committed to our care we will not appro- 
priate to bur own use. 

"That which we borrow we will return according to 
promise, and that which we find we will not appropriate to 
our own use, but seek to return it to its proper owner. 

" We will, as soon as possible, cancel all individual in- 
debtedness contracted prior to our uniting with the order, 
and, when once fully identified with said order, will contract 
no debts contrary to the wishes of the Board of Directors. 
" We will patronize our brethren who are in the order. 
" In our apparel and deportment we will not pattern after 
nor encourage foolish and extravagant fashions, and cease 
to import or buy from abroad any article which can be 
reasonably dispensed with, or which can be produced by 
combination of home labour. We will foster and encourage 
the producing and manufacturing of all articles needful for 
our consumption as fast as our circumstances will permit. 
"We will be simple in our dress and manner of living, 



Practical Piety, 225 



using proper economy and prudence in the management 
of all intrusted to our care. 

" We v/ill combine our labour for mutual benefit, sustain 
with our faith, prayers, and works those whom we have 
elected to take the management of the different depart- 
ments of the order, and be subject to them in their official 
capacity, refraining from a spirit of fault-finding. 

" We will honestly and diligently labour and devote our- 
selves and all we have to the order and to the building up 
of the Kingdom of God." 

Under these general regulations a great number, as I have 
said, enrolled themselves, and they maybe considered there- 
fore to constitute, as it were, a Knight Templar com- 
mandery within a Fellowcraft lodge. All are " brethren ;" 
these are illustrious brethren. All are pashas ; these are 
"of many tails." All are mandarins of heaven ; these wear 
the supreme button. 

But the temporal object of the Order was not served by 
such transfers of moral obligations ; by the hypothecation 
of personal piety; by the investment of spiritual principles 
in a common fund. You cannot get much working capital 
out of mortgages on a man's soul. Calchas complained 
bitterly when the Athenian public paid their vows to the 
goddess in squashes. The collector, he said, would not 
take them in payment of the water-rates. So it has fared 
with the Order of Enoch. It is wealthy in good intentions, 
and if promises were dollars could draw large checks. 

Here and there, however, local fervour took practical 
shape. The Kings of Kingston planted their family flag 
on the wind-swept Circleville plain. At Sunset another 
communistic colony was established, and in Long Valley, in 
the canons of the Rio Virgin, was inaugurated the " United 
Order of Orderville." 

Q 



226 Sinners and Saints, 

Situated in a beautiful valley that needs nothing more 
added to it to make its inhabitants entirely self-supporting ; 
directed and controlled with as much business shrewdness 
as fervent piety; supported by its members with a sensible 
regard for mutual interests— this Orderville experiment 
bids fair to be a signal success. In their Articles of 
Association the members call themselves a Corporation 
which is " to continue in existence for a period of twenty- 
five years," and of which the objects are every sort of 
"rightful" enterprise and industry that may render the 
Order independent of outside produce and manufactures, 
" consistent with the Constitution of the United States and 
the laws of this Territory." Its capital is fixed at $100,000, 
in 10,000 shares of $10 each, and the entire control of its 
affairs is vested in a board of nine directors, who are 
elected by a ballot of the whole community. Article 13 
states that "the individual or private property of the 
stockholders shall not be liable for the debts or obligations 
of the company." Article 15 is as follows: "The directors 
shall have the right and power to declare dividends on said 
stock whenever, in their judgment, there are funds for that 
purpose due and payable." 

Now, in these two last articles lie the saving principles of 
the Orderville scheme, Hitherto, from the beginning of 
the world, experiments in communism have always split 
upon this rock, namely, that individuality was completely 
crushed out. No man was permitted to possess " private " 
property — he was V enfant de la Repiihlique, body and soul 
— and no man, therefore, had sufficient personal identity 
to make it possible for individual profits to accrue to him. 
And so the best of the young men — let the experiment 
be at any date in history you like — became dissatisfied 
with the level at which they were kept, and they seceded. 



Absorption into the Order. 227 

They insisted on having names of their ownj and refused 
to be merely, Hke the members of a jail republic, known 
by numbers. Individuality and identity are the original 
data of human consciousness. They are the first solid 
facts which a baby masters and communicates ; they are 
the last that old age surrenders to infirmity and death. 
But in Orderville, it will be seen, the notion of "private" 
property exists. It is admitted that there is such a thing 
as " individual " ownership. Moreover, it is within the 
power of the board to pay every man a dividend. This 
being the case, this particular experiment in communism 
has the possibility of great success, for its members are not 
utterly deprived of all individuality. They have some 
shreds of it left to them. 

To become a member of the Order there is no quaHfica- 
tion of property necessary. The aged and infirm are 
accepted in charity. Indeed, at one time they threatened 
to swamp the family altogether, for the brethren seemed to 
have set out with a dead-weight upon them heavier than 
they could bear. But this has righted itself. The working 
members have got the ship round again, and in one way or 
another a place and a use has been found for every one. 
Speaking generally, however, membership meant the hold- 
ing of stock in the corporation. If a man wished to join 
the Order, he gave in to the Bishop a statement of his 
effects. It vv-as left to his conscience that this statement 
should be complete and exhaustive; that there should be 
no private reservations. These effects — whatever they 
might be, from a farm in another part of the Territory to, 
the clothes in his trunk — were appraised by the regular 
staff, and the equivalent amount in stock, at $10 a 
share, was issued to them. From that time his ownership 
in his property ceased. His books would perhaps go into 

Q 2 



2 28 Sinners and Saints. 

the school-house Hbrary, his extra blankets next door, his 
horse into a neighbour's team. According to his capacities, 
also, he himself fell at once into his place among the 
workers, going to the woollen factory or the carpenter's 
shop, the blacksmith's forge or the dairy, the saw-mills or 
the garden, the grist-mill or the farm, according as his 
particular abilities gave promise of his being most useful. 
His work here would result, as far as he was personally 
concerned, in no profits. But he was assured of a com- 
fortable house, abundant food, good clothes. The main 
responsibilities of life were therefore taken off his shoulders. 
The wolf could never come to his door. He and his were 
secured against hunger and cold. But beyond this ? There 
was only the approbation of his companions, the reward of 
his conscience. With the proceeds of his labour, or by 
the actual work of his own hands, he saw new buildings 
going up, new acres coming under cultivation. But none 
of them belonged to him. He never became a proprietor, 
an owner, a master. While therefore he was spared the 
worst responsibilities of life, he was deprived of its noblest 
ambitions. He lived without apprehensions, but without 
hopes too. If his wife was ill or his children sickly, there 
were plenty of kind neighbours to advise and nurse and 
look after them. No anxieties on such matters need trouble 
him. But if he had any particular taste — music, botany, 
anything — he was unable to gratify it, unless these same 
kindly neighbours agreed to spend from the common fund 
in order to buy him a violin or a flower-press — and they 
could hardly be expected to do so. Quite apart from the 
fact that a man learning to play a new instrument is. an 
enemy of his kind, you could not expect a community of 
graziers, farmers, and artisans to be unanimously enthusiastic 
about the musical whims of one of their number, still less 



The Commonwealth v. Self, 229 

for his " crank " in collecting ''weeds " — as everything that 
is not eatable (or is not a rose) is called in most places 
of the West. Tastes, therefore, could not be cultivated 
for the want of means, and any special faculties which 
members might individually possess were of necessity kept 
in abeyance. Amid scenery that might distract an artist, 
and fossil and insect treasures enough to send men of 
science crazy, the community can do nothing in the 
direction of Art or of Natural History, unless they all do it 
together. For the Order cannot spare a man who may be 
a good ploughman, to go and sit about in the canons 
painting pictures of pine-trees and waterfalls. Nor can it 
spare the money that may be needed for shingles in buying 
microscopes for a " bug-hunter." The common prosperity, 
therefore, can only be gained at a sacrifice of all individual 
tastes. This alone is a very serious obstacle to success of 
the highest kind. But in combination with this is of course 
the more general and formidable fact that even in the 
staple industries of the community individual excellence 
brings with it no individual benefits. A moral trades- 
unionism planes all down to a level. It does not, of 
course, prevent the enthusiast working his very hardest and 
best in the interests of his neighbours. But such enthusiasm 
is hardly human. Men will insist^ to the end of all time, 
on enjoying the reward of their own labours, the triumphs 
of their own brains. Some may go so far as nominally 
to divide their honours with all their friends. But where 
shall we look for the man who will go on all his life toiling 
successfully for the good of idler folks, and checking his 
own free stride to keep pace with their feebler steps ? And 
this is the rock on which all such communities inevitably 
strike. 

Security from the ordinary apprehensions of life; a 



230 Sinners and Saints, 

general protection against misfortune and "bad seasons j" 
the certainty of having all the necessaries of existence, are 
sufficient temptations for unambitious men. But the 
stronger class of mind, though attracted to it by piety, and 
retained for a while by a sincere desire to promote the com- 
mon good, must from their very nature revolt against a perma- 
nent alienation of their own earnings, and a permanent 
subordination of their own merits. At Orderville, there- 
fore, we find the young men already complaining of a 
system which does not let them see the fruits of their work. 
Their fathers' enthusiasm brought them there as children. 
Seven years later they are grown up into independent- 
minded young men. They have not had experience of 
family anxieties yet. All they know is, that beyond 
Orderville there are larger spheres of work, and more 
brilliant opportunities for both hand and head. 

Fortunately, however, for Orderville, the articles of incor- 
poration give the directors the very powers that are neces- 
sary, and if these are exercised the ship may miss the 
rock that has wrecked all its predecessors. If they can 
declare dividends, open private accounts, and realize the 
idea of personal property, the difference in possibilities 
between the outer world and Orderville will be very greatly 
reduced, while the advantage of certaifities in Orderville 
will be even further increased. Young men would then 
think twice about going away, and any one if he chose 
could indulge his wife with a piano or himself with a box 
of water-colours. Herein then lies the hopefulness of the 
experiment; and fortunately Mr. Howard Spencer, the 
President of the community, has all the generosity to 
recognize the necessity for concession to younger ambition, 
and all the courage to institute and carry out a modification 
of communism which shall introduce more individuality. 



An Eden of Industry, 



I anticipate, therefore, that this very remarkable and 
interesting colony will survive the "twenty-five years" 
period for which it was established, and will encourage the 
foundation of many other similar " Family Orders." 

Seven years have passed since Mr. Spencer pitched his 
camp in the beautiful wilderness ot the Rio Virgin canons. 
He found the hills of fine building-stone, their sides thickly 
grown with splendid pine timber, and down the valley 
between them flowing a bright and ample stream. The 
vegetation by its variety and luxuriance gave promise of a 
fertile soil ; some of the canons formed excellent natural 
meadows, while just over the ridge, a mile or two from the 
settlement, lay a bed of coal. Finally, the cUmate was 
delightfully temperate ! Every condition of success, there- 
fore, was found together, and prosperity has of course 
responded to the voice of industry. Acre by acre the 
wild gardens have disappeared, and in their place stand 
broad fields of corn ; the tangled brakes of wild-berry 
plants have yielded their place to orchards of finer fruits ; 
cattle and sheep now graze in numbers where the antelope 
used to feed ; and from slope to slope you can hear among 
the pines, above the idle crooning of answering doves 
and the tinkling responses of wandering kine, the glad 
antiphony of the whirring saw-mill and the busy loom. 

The settlement itself is grievously disappointing in 
appearance. For as you approach it, past the charming 
little hamlet of Glendale, past such a sunny wealth of 
orchard and meadow and corn-land, past such beautiful 
glimpses of landscape, you cannot help expecting a scene of 
rural prettiness in sympathy with such surroundings. But 
Orderville at first sight looks like a factory. The wooden 
shed-like buildings built in continuous rows, the adjacent 
mills, the bare, ugly patch of hillside behind it, give the 



232 ■ Sinners and Saints, 

actual settlement an uninviting aspect. But once within 
the settlement, the scene changes wonderfully for the better. 
The houses are found, the most of them, built facing in- 
wards upon an open square, with a broad side-walk, edged 
with tamarisk and mulberry, box-elder and maple-trees, in 
front of them. Outside the dwelling-house square are 
scattered about the school-house, meeting-house, black- 
smith and carpenters' shops, tannery, woollen-mill, and so 
forth, while a broad roadway separates the whole from the 
orchards, gardens, and farm-lands generally. Specially 
noteworthy here are the mulberry orchard — laid out for the 
support of the silk-worms, which the community are now 
rearing with much success — and the forcing-ground and 
experimental garden, in which wild flowers as well as 
" tame " are being cultivated. Among the buildings the 
more interesting to me were the school-houses, well fitted 
up, and very fairly provided with educational apparatus ; and 
the rudimentary museum, where the commencement of a 
collection of the natural curiosities of the neighbourhood is 
displayed. What this may some day grow into, w^hen 
science has had the chance of exploring the surrounding 
hills and canons, it is difficult to say \ for Nature has favoured 
Orderville profusely with fossil strata and mineral eccentri- 
cities, a rich variety of bird and insect life, and a prodigious 
botanical luxuriance. Almost for the first time in my 
travels, too, I found here a very intelligent interest taken in 
the natural history of the locality ; but the absence of books 
and of necessary apparatus, as yet of course prevents the 
brethren from carrying on their studies and experiments to 
any standard of scientific value. 

Though staying in Orderville so short a time, I was 
fortunate enough to see the whole community together. 
For on the evening of my arrival there was a meeting at 



The Baby in Public, 233 

which there was a very full gathering of the adults — and the 
babies in arms. The scene was as curious as anything I 
have ever witnessed in any part of the world. The audience 
was almost equally composed of men and women, the latter 
wearmg, most of them, their cloth sun-bonnets, and bring- 
ing with them the babies they were nursing. 

Brigham Young used to encourage mothers to bring them, 
and said that he liked to hear them squalling in the Taber- 
nacle. Whether he really liked it or not, the mothers did as 
he said, and the babies too, and the perpetual bleating of 
babies from every corner of the building makes it seem to 
this day as if religious service was being held in a sheep- 
fold. Throughout the proceedings at Orderville babies 
were being constantly handed across from mother to neigh- 
bour and back from neighbour to mother. Others were 
being tossed up and down with that jerky, perpendicular 
motion which seems so soothing to the very young, but 
which reminded me of the popping up and down of the 
hammers when the " lid " of a piano is lifted up during a 
performance. But the baby is an irrepressible person, and 
at Orderville has it very much its own way. The Apostle's 
voice in prayer was accepted as a challenge to try their 
lungs, and the music (very good, by the way) as a mere 
obligato to their own vocalization. The patient gravity of 
the mothers throughout the whole performance, and the 
apparent indifference of the men, struck me as very curious 
— for I come from a country where one baby will plunge a 
whole church congregation into profanity, and where it is 
generally supposed that two crying together would empty 
heaven. Of the men of Orderville I can say sincerely that 
a healthier, more stalwart community I have never seen, 
while among the women, I saw many refined faces, and 
remarked that robust health seemed the rule. Next 



2 34 Sinners and Saints. 

morning the children were paraded, and such a brigade 
of infantry as it was ! Their legs (I think, though, they are 
known as " limbs " in America) were positively columnar, 
and their chubby Httle owners were as difficult to keep 
quietly in line as so much quicksilver. Orderville boasts 
that it is self-supporting and independent of outside help, 
•and certainly in the matter of babies there seems no neces- 
sity for supplementing home manufactures by foreign 
imports. The average of births is as yet five in each family 
during the six years of the existence of the Order ! Two 
were born the day I arrived. 

Unfortunately one of the most characteristic features of 
this family community was in abeyance during my visit — 
the common dining-table. For a rain-flood swept through 
the gorge above the settlement last winter and destroyed 
" the bakery." Since then the families have dined apart or 
clubbed together in small parties, but the wish of the 
majority is to see the old system revived, for though they 
live well now, they used, they say, to live even better when 
*' the big table " was laid for its 200 guests at once. 

Self-supporting and well-directed, therefore, the Orderville 
" communists " bid fair to prove to the world that pious 
enthusiasm, if largely tempered with business judgment, can 
make a success of an experiment which has hitherto bafiied 
all attempts based upon either one or the other alone. 



235 



CHAPTER XIX. 



MORMON VIRTUES. 



Red ants and anti-Mormons — Ignorance of the Mormons among 
Gentiles in Salt Lake City — Mormon reverence for the Bible — 
Their struggle against drinking-saloons in the city — Conspicuous 
piety in the settlements — Their charity — Their sobriety (to my great 
inconvenience) — The literature of Mormonism utterly unreliable — 
Neglect of the press by the Saints — Explanation of the wide-spread 
misrepresentation of Mormonism. 

From Orderville (after a short tour in the south-west of 
the Territory) I returned to Salt Lake City, and during my 
second sojourn there, over a month, I saw nothing and 
learned nothing either from Mormon or Gentile to induce 
me to erase a single word I had written during my previous 
visit. Indeed, a better acquaintance only strengthened my 
first favourable opinions of " the Saints of the Rocky 
Mountains." 

I was walking one day up the City Creek, when I became 
aware of an aged man seated on a stone by the roadside. 
His trousers were turned up to his knees, and he was 
nursing one of his legs as if he felt a great pity for it. As 
I approached I perceived that he was in trouble— (I per- 
ceived this by his oaths) — and getting still nearer I ventured 
to inquire what annoyed him. " Aged person," said I, 
" what aileth thee ? " — or words to that effect. But there 
was no response, at least not worth mentioning. He only 



2*^6 Sijtners mid Saints. 



bent further over his leg, and I noticed that his coat had 
split down the back seam. His cursing accounted for that. 
It was sufficient to make any coat split. And then his 
hat fell off his head into the dust, in judgment upon him. 
At this he swore again, horribly. By this time I had guessed 
that he had been bitten by red ants (and they are the 
shrewdest reptiles at biting that I know of), so I 
said, "Bitten by red ants, eh?" At this he ex- 
ploded with wrath, and looked up. And such a face ! 
He had a countenance on him like the ragged^ edge of 
despair. His appearance was a calamity. " Red ants^^'' 
said he ; " red Indians, red devils, red hell ! " and then, 
relapsing into the vernacular, he became unintelligibly 
profane, but ended up with " this damned Mormon city." 

Now here was a man, fairly advanced in years, fairly 
clothed, fairly uneducated. As I had never seen him 
before, he may have been, for all I know, " the average 
American " I so often see referred to. Anyhow.*, there he 
was, cursing the Mormons because he had been bitten 
by red ants ! Of his own stupidity he had gone and stood 
upon an ants' nest, thrust his hippopotamus foot into their 
domicile, overwhelming the nurseries and the parlours in 
a common catastrophe^^ crushing with the same heel the 
grandsire ant and the sucking babe at its mother's breast, 
mashing up the infirm and the feeble with the eggs in the 
cells and the household provisions laid up in the larder — 
ruining in fact an industrious community simply by his own 
weight in butcher's meat. Some of the survivors promptly 
attacked the intruding boot, and, running up what the old 
man was pleased to call " his blasted pants," had bitten 
the legs which they found concealed within them. And for 
this, " the average American " cursed the Mormons afid 
their city ! 



A nts and A nti- Mormons, 237 

The incident interested me, for, apart from my sympathy 
with the ants, I couldn't help thinking what a powerful 
adversary to Mormonism this trifling mishap might have 
created. That man went back to his hotel (for he was 
evidently a "visitor") a confirmed ^7z//-Mormon. His 
darkest suspicions about polygamy were confirmed. His 
detestation of the bestial licentiousness of the Saints was 
increased a hundred-fold. He saw at a glance that all he had 
ever heard about " the Danites " was quite true, and much 
more too that he had never heard but could now easily in- 
vent for himself. There was no need for any one to tell 
him^ after the way he had been treated within a mile of the 
Tabernacle, of the infamous debaucheries of Brigham 
Young with his "Cyprian maids" and his "cloistered 
wives." Wasn't it as plain as the sun at noonday that the 
Mormons were in league with the red Indians, and went 
halves in the proceeds of each other's massacres } 

The ant-bitten man was a very typical " Mormon-eater," 
for such is the local name of those who revile Mormonism 
root and branch because they find intelligent men opposed 
to polygamy. They are under the impression, seeing and 
talking to nobody but each other, that the United States in 
a mass, that the whole world, entertain an unreasoning, 
fanatical abhorrence of the inhabitants of the Territory, and 
share with them their mean parochial jealousy of the Mor- 
mon tradesmen and Mormon farmers who are more thriving 
than they are themselves. 

Here in Salt Lake City tftere is the most extraordinary 
ignorance of Mormonism that can be imagined. I have 
actually been assured by " Gentiles" that the Saints do not 
believe in the God of the Bible—that adultery among them 
is winked at by husbands under a tacit understanding of 
reciprocity — that the Mormons as a class are profane, and 



Sinners and Saints. 



drunken, and so forth. Now, if they knew anything what- 
ever of the Mormons, such statements would be impossible 
(unless of course made in wilful malice), for my personal ac- 
quaintance with " the Saints " has shown me that in all classes 
alike the reverence for the God of the Bible is formulated 
not only in their morning and evening prayers, but in their 
grace before every meal ; that so far from there being any 
exceptional familiarity between families, the very reverse is 
conspicuous, for so strict is the Mormon etiquette of social 
courtesies, that households which in England would be on 
the most intimate terms, maintain here a distant formality 
which impresses the stranger as being cold ; that instead of 
the Mormons being as a class profane, they are as a class 
singularly sober in their language, and indeed in this respect 
resemble the Quakers. Now, my opinions are founded 
upon facts of personal knowledge and experience. 

Of course it will be said of me that as I was a " guest " of 
Mormons I was " bound " to speak well of them ; that as I 
was so much among them I was hoodwinked and "shown 
the best side of everything," &c., &c. Against this argument, 
always the resource of the gobemouche, common sense is 
useless. " Against stupidity the gods themselves are power- 
less." But this I can say — that I will defy any really im- 
pure household, monogamous or not, to hoodwink me in 
the same way — to keep up from morning to night the same 
unchanging profession of piety, to make believe from week 
to week with such consummate hypocrisy that they are god- 
fearing and pure in their lives, and to wear a mask of sobriety 
with such uniform success. And I am not speaking of 
one household only, but of a score to which I was admitted 
simply as being a stranger from whom they need not 
fear calumny. I do not believe that acting exists anywhere 
in such perfection that a whole community can assume, at a 



Gentile abuses of Power. 239 

few hours' notice and for tlie benefit of a passing stranger, the 
characters of honest, kind-hearted, simple men and women, 
and set themselves patiently to a three months' comedy of 
pretended purity. Such impostors do not exist. 

The Mormons drunken ! Now what, for instance, can 
be the conclusion of any honest thinker from this fact — 
that though I mixed constantly with Mormons, all of 
them anxious to show me every hospitality and courtesy, 
I was never at any time asked to take a glass of strong 
drink ? If I wanted a horse to ride or to drive I had 
a choice at once offered me. If I wanted some one to 
go with me to some point of interest, his time was mine. 
Yet it never occurred to them to show a courtesy by 
suggesting " a drink." 

Then, seriously, how can any one have respect for the 
literature or the men who, without knowing anything of the 
lives of Mormons, stigmatize them as profane, adulterous, 
and drujiken ? As a community I know them, from per- 
sonal advantages of observation such as no non-Mormoti 
writer has ever previously possessed,^ to be at any rate ex- 
ceptionally careful in maintaining the appearance of piety 
and sobriety; and I leave it to my readers to judge whether 
such solid hypocrisy as this, that tries to abolish all swear- 
ing and all strong drink both by precept from the pulpit and 
example in the household, is not, after all, nearly as admira- 
ble as the real thing itself. 

This, at all events, is beyond doubt — that the Mormons 
have always struggled hard to prevent the sale of liquor in 
Salt Lake City, except under strict regulations and super- 
vision. But the fight has gone against them. The courts up- 
hold the right of publicans to sell when and what they choose; 
and the Mormons, who could at one time boast — and visi- 
1 Except, of course, General Kane. 



240 Sinners and Saints. 



tors without number have borne evidence to the fact — that 
a drunkard was never to be seen, an oath never to be heard, 
in the streets of their city, have now to confess that, thanks 
to the example of Gentiles, they have both drunkards and 
profane men among them. But the general attitude of the 
Church towards these delinquents, and the sorrow that their 
weakness causes in the family circle, are in themselves proofs 
of the sincerity in sobriety which distinguishes the Mor- 
mons. Nor is it any secret that if the Mormons had the 
power they would to-morrow close all the saloons and bars, 
except those under Church regulation, and then, they say, 
" we might hope to see the old days back when we never 
thought of locking our doors at night, and when our wives 
and girls, let them be out ever so late, needed no escort in 
the streets." 

And having travelled throughout the Mormon settlements, 
I am at a loss how to convey to my readers with any 
brevity the effect which the tour has had upon me. 

I have seen, and spoken to, and Hved with. Mormon men 
and women of every class, and never in my life in any 
Christian country, not even in happy, rural England, 
have I come in contact with more consistent piety, so- 
briety, and neighbourly charity. I say this deliberately. 
Without a particle of odious sanctimony these folk are, 
in their words and actions, as ChiHstian as I had ever 
thought to see men and women. A perpetual spirit 
of charity seems to possess them, and if the prayers of 
simple, devout humanity are ever of any avail, it must 
surely be this wonderful Mormon earnestness in appeals to 
Heaven. I have often watched Moslems in India praying, 
and thought then that I had seen the extremity of devotion, 
but now that I have seen these people on their knees in 
their kitchens at morning and at night, and heard their old 



Ignorant Calumny. 241 



men— men who remember the dark days of the Faith- 
pour out from their hearts their gratitude for past mercy, 
their pleas for future protection, I find that I have met 
with even a more striking form of prayer than I have 
ever met with before. Equally striking is the universal 
reverence and affection with which they, quite unconscious 
of the fact that I was " taking notes," spoke of the authori- 
ties of their Church. Fear there was none, but respect 
and love were everywhere. It would be a bold man who, 
in one of these Mormon hamlets, ventured to repeat the 
slanders current among Gentiles elsewhere. And it would 
indeed be a base man who visited these hard-living, 
trustful men and women, and then went away to calumniate 
them. 

But it is a fact, and cannot be challenged, that the only 
people in all Utah who libel these Mormons are either 
those who are ignorant of them, those who have apostatized 
(frequently under compulsion) from the Church, or those, the 
official clique and their sycophants, who have been charged 
with looking forward to a share of the plunder of the Terri- 
torial treasury. On the other hand, I know many Gentiles 
who, though like myself they consider polygamy itself 
detestable, speak of this people as patterns to themselves 
in commercial honesty, religious earnestness, and social 
charity. 

Travelling through the settlements, I found that every 
" one voluntarily considered his poorer neighbours as a charge 
upon himself. When a man arrives there, a stranger and 
penniless, one helps to get together logs for his first hut, 
another to break up a plot of ground. A third lends him 
his waggon to draw some firewood from the canon or hill- 
side ; a fourth gives up some of his time to show him how 
to bring the water on to his ground— and so on through 

R 



242 Sinners and Saints, 

all the first requirements of the forlorn new-comer. Behind 
them all meanwhile is the Church, in the person of the 
presiding Elder of the settlement, who makes him such ad- 
vances as are considered necessary. It is a wonderful system, 
and as pathetic, to my mind, as any struggle for existence 
that I have ever witnessed. But every man who comes 
among them is another unit of strength, and let him be 
only a straight-spoken, fair-dealing fellow, with his heart 
in his work, and he finds every one's hand ready to assist 
him. 

And the first commencement is terribly small. A one- 
roomed log hut is planted in a desert of sage-brush " with 
roots that hold as firm as original sin," and rocks that are 
as hard to get rid of as bad habits. Borrowing a plough 
here, and a shovel there, the new-comer bungles through 
an acre or two of furrows, and digs out a trench. Begging 
of one neighbour some fruit-tree cuttings, he sticks the 
discouraging twigs into the ground, and by working out 
some extra time for another gets some lucerne seed. Then 
he gets a hen, and then a setting of eggs, by-and-by a 
heifer, and a little later, by putting in work or by an 
advance from the Church, or with kindly help from a 
neighbour, he adds a horse to his stock. Time passes, say 
a year ; his orchard (that is to be) has several dozen leaves 
on it, and the ground is all green with lucerne, the chickens 
are thriving, and he adds an acre or two more to the first 
patch, and his neighbours, seeing him in earnest, are still 
ready with their advice and aid. Adobe bricks are gradually 
piled up in a corner of the lot, and very soon an extra 
room or two is built on to the log hut, and saplings of 
cotton-wood, or poplar, or locust are planted in a row 
before the dwelling: and so on year by year, conquering 
a little more of the sage-brush, bringing on the water a 



Sincei^iiy in Religion. 243 

furlong further, adding an outhouse, planting another tree. 
At the end of ten years — years of unsparing, untiring 
labour, but years brightened with perpetual kindness from 
neighbours — this man, the penniless emigrant, invites the 
wayfarer into his house, has a comfortably furnished bed- 
room at his service, oats and fodder for his team, ample 
and wholesome food for all. The wife spreads the table 
with eggs and ham and chicken, vegetables, pickles, and 
preserves, milk and cream, pies and puddings, — " Yes, sir, 
all of our own raising." The dismal twigs have grown up 
into pleasant shade -trees, and a flower-garden brightens 
the front of the house. In the barn are comfortable, well- 
fed stock, horses and cows. This is no fancy picture, but 
one from life, and typical of 20,000 others. Each home- 
stead in turn has the same experience, and it is no wonder, 
therefore, when the settlement, properly laid out and or- 
ganized, grows into municipal existence, that every one 
speaks kindly of, and acts kindly towards, his neighbour. 
A visitor, till he understands the reason, is surprised at 
the intimacy of households. But when he does understand 
it, ought not his surprise to give place to admiration ? 

Not less conspicuous is the uniform sincerity in religion. 
A school and meeting-house is to be found in every 
settlement, even though there may be only half-a-dozen 
families, and besides the regular attendance of the people 
at weekly services, the private prayers of each household 
are as punctual as their meals. In these prayers, after the 
ordinary generalities, the head of the' house usually prays 
for all the authorities of the Church, from the President 
downwards, for the local authorities, for the Church as a 
body, and the missionaries abroad, for his household and 
its guest, for the United States, and for Congress, and 
for all the world that feels kindly towards Mormonism. 

R 2 



244 Sinners and Saints, 

But quite apart from the matter of their prayers, their 
manner is very striking, and the scene in a humble 
house, when a large family meets for prayer — and half the 
members, finding no article of furniture unoccupied for 
the orthodox position of devotion, drop into attitudes of 
natural reverence, kneeling in the middle of the floor — 
appeals very strongly to the eye of those accustomed tr 
the stereotyped piety of a more advanced civilization. 

One more conspicuous feature of Mormon life is sobriety 
I have been the guest of some fifty different households, 
and only once I was offered even beer. That exception 
was in a Danish household, where the wife brewed her 
own " 51 "—an opaque beverage of home-fermented wheat 
and home-grown hops — as a curiosity curious, as an ''in- 
dulgence " doubtful, as a regular drink impossible. On 
no other occasion was anything but tea, coffee, milk, or 
water offered. And even tea and coffee, being discouraged 
by the Church, are but seldom drunk. As a heathen 
outsider I deplored my beer, and was grateful for coffee ; 
but the rest of the household, in almost every instance, 
drank water. Tobacco is virtually unused. It is used, 
but so seldom that it does not affect my statement. The 
spittoon, therefore, though in every room, is behind the 
door, or in a corner under a piece of furniture. In case 
it should be needed, it is there — like the shot-gun upstairs — 
but its being called into requisition would be a family event. 

No, let their enemies say what they will, the Mormon 
settlements are each of them to-day a refutation of the libel 
that the Mormons are not sincere in their antipathy to 
strong drink and tobacco. That individual Mormons drink 
and smoke proves nothing, except that they do it. For the 
great majority of the Mormons, they are strictly sober. I 
know it to my great inconvenience. 



Mormon Apathy under Libel. 245 

Is it possible then that the American people, so generous 
in their impulses, so large-hearted in action, have been 
misled as to the true character of the Mormon " problem " ? 
At first sight this may seem impossible. A whole people, 
it will be said, cannot have been misled. But I think ,a 
general misapprehension is quite within the possibilities. 

Whence have the public derived their opinions about 
Mormonism ? From aiiti-Morjnons only. I have ransacked 
the literature of the subject, and yet I really could not 
tell any one where to go for an impartial book about 
Mormonism later in date than Burton's " City of the 
Saints," published in 1862. Burton, it is well known, 
wrote as a man of wide travel and liberal education — 
catholic, therefore, on all matters religious, and generous 
in his views of ethical and social obliquities, sympathetic, 
consistent, and judicial. It is no wonder, then, that 
Mormons remember the distinguished traveller, in spite of 
his candour, with the utmost kindness. But put Burton 
on one side, and I think I can defy any one to name 
another book about the Mormons worthy of honest respect. 
From that truly awful book, " The History of the Saints," 
published by one Bennett (even an anti-Mormon has 
styled him " the greatest rascal that ever came to the 
West ") in 1842, down to Stenhouse's in 1873, there is not, 
to my knowledge, a single Gentile work before the public 
that is not utterly unreliable from its distortion of facts. 
Yet it is from these books — for there are no others — that 
the American public has acquired nearly all its ideas about 
the people of Utah. 

The Mormons themselves are most foolishly negligent 
of the power of the press, and of the immense value in 
forming public opinion of a free use of type. They affect 
to be indifferent to the clamour of the world, but when this 



246 Simters a7td Saints, 

clamour leads to legislative action against them, they turn 
round petulantly with the complaint that there is a universal 
conspiracy against them. It does not seem to occur to 
them that their misfortunes are partly due to their own 
neglect of the very weapons which their adversaries have 
used so diligently, so unscrupulously, and so successfully. 

They do not seem to understand that a public contradic- 
tion given to a public calumny goes some way towards 
correcting the mischief done, or that by anticipating ma- 
licious versions of events they could as often as not get 
an accurate statement before the public, instead of an 
inaccurate one. But enterprise in advertisement has been 
altogether on the side of the anti-Mormons. The latter 
never lose an opportunity of throwing in a bad word, 
while the Mormons content themselves with " rounding 
their shoulders," as they are so fond of saying, and putting 
a denial of the libel into the local News. They say they are 
so accustomed to abuse that they are beginning not to care 
about it — which is the old, stupid self-justification of the 
apathetic. The fascination of a self-imposed martyrdom 
seems too great for them, and, like flies when they are being 
wrapped up into parcels by the spider for greater con- 
venience of transportation to its larder, they sing chastened 
canticles about the inevitability of cobwebs and the de- 
plorable rapacity of spiders. 

'' I can assure you," said one of them, "it would be of 
no use trying to undeceive the public. You cannot make a 
whistle out of a pig's tail, you know." 

" Nonsense," I replied. " You can — for I have seen a 
whistle made out of a pig's tail. And it is in a shop in Chi- 
cago to this day ! " 

It will be understood, then, that the Mormons have made 
no adequate efforts either in books or the press to meet 



How the Public are Misled, 247 



their antagonists. They prefer to allow cases against them 
to go by default, and content themselves with privately filing 
pleas in defence which would have easily acquitted them 
had they gone before the public. America, therefore, 
hearing only one side of the case, and so much of it, is 
certainly not to be blamed for drawing its conclusions 
from the only facts before it. It cannot be expected 
to know that three or four individuals, all of them by their 
own confession "Mormon-eaters," have from the first been 
the purveyors of nearly all the distorted facts it receives. 
Seeing the same thing said in many different directions, the 
general public naturally conclude that a great number of 
persons are in agreement as to the facts. 

But the exigencies of journalism which admit, for in- 
stance, of the same correspondent being a local contri- 
butor to two or three score newspapers of widely differing 
views in politics and religion, are unknown to them. 
And they are therefore unaware that the indignation so 
widely printed throughout America has its source in the 
personal animosity of three or four individuals only who are 
bitterly sectarian, and that these men are actually personally 
ignorant of the country they live in, have seldom talked to 
a Mormon, and have never visited Mormonism outside 
Salt Lake City. These men write of the " squalid poverty " 
of Mormons, of their obscene brutality, of their unceasing 
treason towards the United States, of their blasphemous 
repudiation of the Bible, without one particle of information 
on the subject, except such as they gather from the books 
and writings of men whom they ought to know are utterly 
unworthy of credit, or from the verbal calumnies of apostates. 
And what the evidence of apostates is worth history has 
long ago told us. I am now stating facts; and I, who 
have lived among the Mormons and with them, who 



248 Sinners and Saints. 

have seen them in their homes, rich and poor \ have joined 
in their worship, pubHc and private ; who have constantly 
conversed with them, men, women, and children; who 
have visited their out-lying settlements, large and small — 
as no Gentile has ever done before me — can assure my 
readers that every day of my residence increased my regret 
at the misrepresentation these people have suffered. 



The Ontario Mint 249 



CHAPTER XX. 

DOWN THE ONTARIO MINE. 

^^ Been down a mine! What on earth did you do that 
for ? " said the elder Sheridan to the younger. 

*' Oh, just to say that I had done it," was the reply. 

" To say that you had done it ! Good gracious ! 
Couldn't you have said that without going down a mine ? " 

No, Mr. Sheridan, you could not ; at least not in these 
latter days. Too man/ people do it now for the impostor 
to remain undiscovered. Take my own case, for instance. 
I had often read descriptions of mine descents, and 
thought I knew how it happened, and how ore was got 
out. But no one ever told me that you had to go paddling 
about in water half the time, or that mines were excavated 
upwards. Now, then, if I had tried to pretend that I had 
been down a mine I should have been prompdy found 
out, by my ignorance of the two first facts that strike one. 
Again, it is very simple work imagining the descent of a 
" shaft " in a " cage." But unfortunately a cage is only 
a platform to stand on without either sides or top, and not, 
therefore, such a cage as one would buy to keep a bird in, or 
as would keep a bird in if one did buy it. Nor, without 
actually experiencing it, could anybody guess that the first 
sensation of whizzing down a pipe, say 800 feet, is that 



250 Sinners and Saints, 

of seeming to lose all your specific gravity, and that the 
next (after you had partially collected your faculties) is that 
you are stationary yourself, but that the dripping timbers 
that line the shaft are all flying upwards past you like 
sparks up a chimney. 

Mines, of course, differ from one another just as the 
men who go down them do, but as far as I myself am 
concerned all mines are puddly places, and the sensa- 
tions of descent are ridiculous — for I have only been down 
two in my life, and both "demned, damp, moist, un- 
pleasant " places. But the mine to which I now refer is 
the " Ontario," in Utah, which may be said, in the pre- 
posterous vernacular of the West, to be a " terrible fine " 
mine, or, in other words, "a boss mine," that is to say, 
"a daisy." 

As for daisies, anything that greatly takes the fancy 
or evokes especial admiration is called a daisy. Thus 
I heard a very much respected Mormon Bishop, who 
is also a director of a railway, described by an enthusiastic 
admirer as " a daisy ! " 

Finding myself in Park " City " one evening — it is a 
mining camp dependent chiefly upon the Ontario— I took 
a walk up the street with a friend. Every other house 
appeared to be a saloon, with a doctor's residence sand- 
wiched in between — a significantly convenient arrangement 
perhaps in the days when there was no " Protective Com- 
mittee " in Park City, but — so I am told — without much 
practical benefit to the public in these quiet days, when 
law-abiding citizens do their own hanging, without troubling 
the county sheriff, who lives somewhere on the other side 
of a distance. The result of this is that bad characters 
do not stay long enough in Park City now to get up free 
fights, and make work for the doctors. The Protective 



The Ontario Mine. 251 

Committee invites them to *' git " as soon as they arrive, 
and, to do them credit, they do " git." 

However, as I was saying, I took a walk with a friend 
along the street, and presently became aware above me, 
high up on the hillside, of a great collection of buildings, 
with countless windows (I mean that I did not try to 
count them) lit up, and looking exactly like some theatrical 
night-scene. These were the mills of the Ontario, which 
work night and day, and seven days to the week, a per- 
petual flame like that of the Zoroastrians, and as carefully 
kept alive by stalwart stokers as ever was Vestal altar-fire 
by the girl-pr.iestesses of Rome. It was a picturesque 
sight, with the huge hills looming up black behind, and 
the few surviving pine-trees showing out dimly against the 
darkening sky. 

Next morning I went up to the mine— and down it 
Having costumed myself in garments that made getting 
dirty a perfect luxury, I was taken to the shaft. Now, 
I had expected to see an unfathomably black hole in the 
ground with a rope dangling down it, but instead of that 
I found myself in a spacious boarded shed, with a huge 
wheel standing at one end and a couple of iron uprights 
with a cross-bar standing up from the floor at the other. 
Round the wheel was coiled an enormous length of a six- 
inch steel-wire band, and the disengaged end of the band, 
after passing over a beam, was fastened to the cross-bar 
above mentioned. On the bridge of the wheel stood an 
engineer, the arbiter of fates, who is perpetually unwinding 
victims down from stage to stage of the Inferno, and 
winding up the redeemed from limbo to limbo. Having 
propitiated him by an affectation of intelligence as to the 
machinery which he controlled, we took our places under 
the cross-bar, between the stanchions, and suddenly the 



252 Sinners and Saints. 

floor — as innocent-looking and upright-minded a bit of 
boarded floor as you could wish to stand on — gave way 
beneath us, and down we shot apiid mfe7vs, like the devils 
in " Der Freischiitz." We had our lamps in our hands, 
and they gave just light enough for me to see the dripping 
wooden walls of the shaft flashing past, and then I felt 
myself becoming lighter and lighter — a mere butterfly — 
imponderable. But it doesn't take many seconds to fall 
down 800 feet, and long before I had expected it I found 
we were " at the bottom." 

Our explorations then began ; and very queer it all was, 
with the perpetual gushing of springs from the rock, and 
the bubble and splash of the waters as they ran along on 
either side the narrow tunnels ; the meetings at corners 
with little cars being pushed along by men who looked, 
as they bent low to their work, like those load-roUing 
beetles that Egypt abounds in ; the machinery for pump- 
ing, so massive that it seemed much more likely that it 
was found where it stood, the vestiges of a long-past sub- 
terranean civilization, than that it had been brought down 
there by the men of these degenerate days; the sudden 
endings of the tunnels which the miners were driving along 
the vein, with a man at each ending, his back bent to 
fit into the curve which he had made in the rock, and 
reminding one of the frogs that science tells us are found 
at times fitted into holes in the middle of stones; the 
climbing up hen-roost ladders from tunnel to tunnel, from 
one darkness into another ; the waiting at different spots 
till " that charge had been blasted," and the dull, deadened 
roar of the explosion had died away; the watching the 
solitary miners at their work picking and thumping at the 
discoloured strips of dark rock that looked to the uninitiated 
only like water-stained, mildewy accidents in the general 



The Ontario Mine. 253 

structure, but which, in reaUty, was silver, and yielding, it 
might be, $1600 to the ton ! 

"This is all very rich ore," said my guide, kicking a heap 
that I was standing on. I got off it at once, reverentially. 

But reverence for the Mother of the Dollar gradually 
dies out, for everything about you, above you, beneath you, 
is silver or silverish— dreadful rubbish to look at, it is true, 
but with the spirit of the great metal in it all none the 
less ; that fairy Argentine who builds palaces for men, and 
gives them, if they choose, all the pleasures of the world, 
and the leisure wherein to enjoy them. And there they 
stood, these latter-day Cyclops, working away like the 
gnomes of the Hartz Mountains, or the entombed artificers 
of the Bear-Kings of Dardistan, with their lanterns glowing 
at the end of their tunnels like the Kanthi gem which 
Shesh, the fabled snake-god, has provided for his gloomy 
empire of mines under the Nagas' hills. Useless crystals 
glittered on every side, as if they were jejvels, and the 
water dripping down the sides glistened as if it was silver, 
but the pretty hypocrisy was of no avail. For though the 
ore itself was dingy and ugly and uninviting, the ruthless 
pick pursued it deeper and deeper into its retreat, and 
only struck the harder the darker and uglier it got. It 
reminded me, watching the miner at his work, of the fairy 
story where the prince in disguise has to kill the lady of 
his love in order to release her from the enchantments 
which have transformed her, and how the wicked witch 
makes her take shape after shape to escape the resolute 
blows of the desperate lover. But at last his work is 
accomplished, and the ugly thing stands before him in all 
the radiant beauty of her true nature. 

And it is a long process, and a costly one, before the 
lumps of heavy dirt which the miner pecks out of the 



2 54 Sinners and Saints. 

inside of a hill are transformed into those hundredweight 
blocks of silver bullion which the train from Park City 
carries every morning of the year into Salt Lake City. 
From first to last it is pretty much as • follows. Remember 
I am not writing for those who live inside mines ; very 
much on the contrary. I am writing for those who have 
never been down a mine in their lives, but who may care 
to read an unscientific description of " mining," and the 
Ontario mine in particular. 

In 1872 a couple of men made a hole in the ground, 
and finding silver ore in it offered the hole for sale at 
$30,000. A clever man, R. C. Chambers by name, hap- 
pened to come along, and liking the look of the hole, 
joined a friend in the purchase of it. The original diggers 
thus pocketed $30,000 for a few days' work, and no 
doubt thought they had done a good thing. But alas 1 
that hole in the ground which they were so glad to get 
rid of ten years ago now yields every day a. larger sum in 
dollars than they sold it for ! The new owners of the hole, 
which was christened " The Ontario Mine," were soon at 
work, but instead of following them through the different 
stages of development, it is enough to describe what that 
hole looks like and produces to-day. 

A shaft, then, has been sunk plumb down into the moun- 
tain for 900 feet, and from this shaft, at every 100 feet as 
you go down, you find a horizontal tunnel running off to 
right and left. If you stop in your descent at any one of 
these " stages " and walk through the tunnel — water rushing 
all the way over your feet, and the vaulted rock dripping over- 
head — you will find that a line of rails has been laid down 
along it, and that the sides and roofs are strongly supported 
by timbers of great thickness. These timbers are necessary 
to prevent, in the first place, the rock above from crushing 



The Ontario Mine, ' 255 

down through the roof of the tunnel, and, in the next, 
from squeezing in its sides, for the rock every now and 
then swells and the sides of the tunnels bulge in. The 
rails are, of course, for the cars which the miners fill with 
ore, and push from the end of the tunnel to the " stage." A 
man there signals by a bell which communicates with the 
engineer at the big wheel in the shed I have already spoken 
of, and there being a regular code of signals, the engineer 
knows at once at which stage the car is waiting, and how 
far therefore he is to let the cage down. Up goes the car 
with its load of ore into the daylight, — and then its troubles 
begin. 

But meanwhile let us stay a few minutes more in the 
mine. Walking along any one of the main horizontal 
tunnels, we come at intervals to a ladder, and going up 
one of them we find that a stope, or smaller gallery, is 
being run parallel with the tunnel in which we are walking, 
and of course (as it follows the same direction of the ore), 
immediately over that tunnel, so that the roof of the tunnel 
is the floor of the stope. The stopes are just wide enough 
for a man to work in easily, and are as high as he can 
reach easily with his pickaxe, about seven feet. If you 
walk along one of these stopes you come to another ladder, 
and find it leads to another stope above, and going up 
this you find just the same again, until you become aware 
that the whole mountain above you is pierced throughout 
the length of the ore vein by a series of seven-foot galleries 
lying exactly parallel one above the other, and separated 
only by a sufficient thickness of pine timber to make a 
solid floor for each. But at every hundred feet, as I have 
said, there comes a main tunnel, down to which all the 
produce of the minor galleries above it is shot down by 
" shoots," loaded into cars and pushed along to the " stage," 



256 ' Sinners aiid Saints. 



But silver ore is not the only thing that the Company gets 
out of its mine, for unfortunately the mountain in which 
the Ontario is located is full of springs, and the miner's 
pick is perpetually, therefore, letting the water break into 
the tunnels, and in such volume, too, that I am informed 
it costs as much to rid the works of the water as to get 
out the silver ! Streams gurgle along all the tunnels, and 
here and there ponderous bulkheads have been put up to 
keep the water and the loosened rock from falling in. 
Pumps of tremendous power are at work at several levels 
throwing the water up towards the surface — one of these 
at the 800-foot level throwing 1500 gallons a minute up to 
the 500-foot level. 

Following a car-load of ore, we find it, having reached the 
surface, being loaded into waggons, in which it is carried 
down the hill to the mills, weighed, and then shot down 
into a gigantic bin — in which, by the way, the Company 
always keeps a reserve of ore sufficient to keep the mills in 
full work for two years. From this hour, life becomes a 
burden to the ore, for it is hustled about from machine to 
machine without the least regard to its feelings. No sooner 
is it out of the waggon than a brutal crusher begins smash- 
ing it up into small fragments, the result of this meanness 
being that the ore is able to tumble through a screen into 
cars that are waiting for it down below. These rush up- 
stairs with it again and pour it into " hoppers," which, being 
in the conspiracy too, begin at once to spill it into gigantic 
drying cylinders that are perpetually revolving over a terrific 
furnace fire, and the ore, now dust, comes streaming out as 
dry as dry can be, is caught in cars and wheeled off to bat- 
teries where forty stampers, stamping Hke one, pound and 
smash it as if they took a positive delight in it. There is 
an intelligent, deliberate determination about this fearful 



The Ontario Mine. 257 

stamping which makes one feel almost afraid of the 
machinery. Some pieces, however, actually manage to 
escape sufficient mashing up and slip away with the rest 
down into a "screw conveyor," but the i^oor wretches are 
soon found out, for the fiendish screw conveyor empties 
itself on to a screen, through which all the pulverized ore 
goes shivering down, but the guilty lumps still remaining are 
carried back by another ruthlesss machine to those detest- 
able stamps again. They cannot dodge them. For these 
machines are all in the plot together. Or rather, they are 
the honest workmen of good masters, and they are deter- 
mined that the work shall be thoroughly done, and that not 
a single lump of ore shall be allowed to skulk. So without 
any one to look after them these cylinders and stampers, 
hoppers and dryers, elevators and screens go on with their 
work all day, all night, relentless in their duty and pitiless 
to the ore. Let a lump dodge them as it may, it gets no 
good by it, for the one hands it over to the other, just as 
constables hand over a thief they have caught, and it goes 
its rounds, again and again, till the end eventually overtakes 
it, and it falls through the screen in a fine dust. 

For its sins it is now called " pulp," and starts off on a 
second tour of suffering — for these Inquisitors of iron and 
steel, these blind, brutal Cyclops-machines, have only just 
begun, as it were, their fun with their victim. Its tortures 
are now to be of a more searching and refined description. 
As it falls through the screen, another screw-conveyor 
catches sight of it and hurries it along a revolving tube into 
which salt is being perpetually fed from a bin overhead — 
this salt, allow me to say for the benefit of those as ignorant 
as myself, is " necessary as a chloridizer " — and thus mixed 
up with the stranger, falls into the power of a hydraulic 
elevator, which carries it up forty feet to the top of a roast- 

s 



258 Sin ners and Saints. 

ing furnace and deliberately spills the mixture into it ! 
Looking into the solid flame, I appreciated for the first 
time in my life the courage of Shadrach, Meshach. and 
Abednego. 

The mixture which fell in at the top bluish-grey comes 
out at the bottom yellowish-brown — I only wonder at its 
coming out all — and is raked into heaps that have a wicked, 
lurid colour and give out such fierce short flames of brilliant 
tints, and such fierce, short blasts of a poisonous gas, that 
I could not help thinking of the place where bad men go 
to, and wondering if a Dante could not get a hint or two for 
improving his Inferno by a visit to the Ontario roasting- 
furnace. The men who stir these heaps use rakes with pro- 
digious handles, and wear wet sponges over their mouths 
and noses, and as I watched them I remembered the poet's 
devils who keep on prodding up the damned and raking 
them about over the flames. 

But the ore submits without any howling or gnashing of 
teeth, and is dragged off dumb, and soused into great churns, 
kept at a boiling heat, in which quicksilver is already lying 
waiting, and the ore and the quicksilver are then churned 
up together by revolving wheels inside the pans, till the 
contents look like huge caldrons of bubbling chocolate. 
After some hours they are drained off into settlers and cold 
water is let in upon the mess, and lo ! silver as bright as the 
quicksilver with which it is mixed comes dripping out 
through the spout at the bottom into canvas bags. 

Much of the quicksilver drips through the canvas back 
into the pans, and the residue, silver mixed with quick- 
silver, makes a cold, heavy, white paste called " amalgam," 
which is carried off" in jars to the retorts. Into these it is 
thrown, and while lying there the quicksilver goes on drip- 
ping away from the silver, and after a time the fires are 



The 07ttai'io Mine. 259 

lighted and the retort is sealed up. The intense heat that 
is obtained volatilizes the quicksilver; but this mercurial 
vapour is caught as it is escaping at the top of the retort, 
again condensed into its solid form, and again used to mix 
with fresh silver ore. Its old companion, the silver, goes 
on melting inside the retort all the time, till at last when 
the fires are allowed to cool down, it is found in irregular 
lumps of a pink-looking substance. These lumps are then 
taken to the crucibles, and passing from them, molten and 
refined, fall into moulds, each holding about a hundred- 
weight of bullion. 

And all this bother and fuss, reader, to obtain these 
eight or ten blocks of metal ! 

True, but then that metal is silver^ and with one single 
day's produce from the Ontario Mine in the bank to his 
credit a man might live at his leisure in London, like a 
nobleman in Paris, or like a prince among the princes of 
Eulenspiegel-Wolfenbiittel-Gutfiirnichts. 



ea 



26o Sinners and Saints. 



CHAPTER XXI. 

FROM UTAH INTO NEVADA. 

Rich and ugly Nevada— Leaving Utah — The gift of the Alfalfa — • 
Through a lovely country to Ogden — The great food -devouring 
trick — From Mormon to Gentile : a sudden contrast — The son 
of a cinder — Is the red man of no use at all ?— The papoose's 
papoose— Children all of one family. 

It is a far cry from the City of the Saints to the city of the 
Celestials, for Nevada stretches all its hideous length be- 
tween them, and thus keeps apart the two American pro- 
blems of the day — pigtails and polygamy. But mere length 
in miles is not all that goes to make a journey seem long, 
for dreariness of landscape stretches every yard to six feet, 
and turns honest miles into rascally versts, or elongates them 
into the still more infamous "kos " of the East, the so-called 
mile, which seems to lengthen out at the other end as you 
travel along it, and about nightfall to lose the other end alto- 
gether. And Nevada is certainly dreary enough for any- 
thing. It is abominably rich, I know. There is probably 
more filthy lucre in it per acre (in a crude state, of course) 
than in any other state in the Union, and more dollars 
piled up in those ghastly mountains than in any other range 
in America. But, as a fellow-passenger remarked, " There's 
a pile of land in Nevada that don't amount to much," and it 
is just this part of Nevada that the traveller by railway sees. 
" That hill over there is full of silver," said a stranger to 
me, by way of propitiating my opinion. 



Rich and ugly Nevada, 261 

" Is it ?" I said, " the brute." I really couldn't help it. I 
had no ill-feeling towards the hill, and if it had asked 
a favour of me, I believe I should have granted it as 
readily as any one. But its repulsive appearance was 
against it, and the idea of its being full of silver stirred my 
indignation. I grudged so ugly a cloud its silver lining, 
and like the sailor in the Summer Palace at Pekin felt 
moved to insult it. The sailor I refer to was in one of the 
courts of the palace looking about for plunder. It did not 
occur to his weather-beaten, nautical intelligence that every- 
thing about him was moulded in solid silver. He thought 
it was lead. A huge dragon stood in the corner of the 
room, and the atrocity of its expression exasperated Jack so 
acutely that he smote it with his cutlass, and lo ! out of the 
monster's wound poured an ichor of silver coinage. 

" Who'd have thought it ! " said Jack, " the ugly devil f " 

Nevada, moreover, lies under the disadvantage of having 
on one side of it the finest portion of California, on the other 
the finest portion of Utah, and sandwiched between two 
such Beauties, such a Beast naturally looks its worst. For 
the northern angle of Utah is by far the most fertile part of 
the territory, possessing, in patches, some incomparable 
meadows, and corn-lands of wondrous fertiUty. As compared 
with the prodigious agricultural and pastoral wealth of such 
states as Missouri, lUinois, or Ohio, the Cache Valleys and 
Bear Valleys of Utah seem of course insignificant enough ; 
but at present I am comparing them only with the rest of 
poor Utah, and with ugly, wealthy Nevada. 

Starting from Salt Lake City northwards, the road lies 
through suburbs of orchards and gardens, many of them 
smothered in red and yellow roses, out on to the levels of 
the Great Valley. Here, beyond the magic circle of the 
Water-wizard, there are patches of fen-lands still delightful 



262 Sinners and Saints, 

to wild-fowl, and patches of alkali blistering in the sun, but 
all about them stretch wide meadows of good grazing-ground, 
where the cattle, good Devon breed many of them, and 
here and there a Jersey, loiter about, and bright fields of 
lucerne, or alfalfa, just purpling into blossom and haunted 
by whole nations of bees and tribes of yellow butterflies. 
What a gift this lucerne has been to Utah ! Indeed, as the 
Mormons say, the territory could hardly have held its own 
had it not been for this wonderful plant. Once get it well 
started (and it will grow apparently anywhere) the "alfalfa" 
strikes its roots ten, fifteen, twenty feet into the ground, and 
defies the elements. More than this, it becomes aggressive, 
and, like the white races, begins to encroach upon, dominate' 
over, and finally extinguish the barbarian weeds, its wild 
neighbours. 

Scientific experiments with other plants have taught 
us that vegetables wage war with each other, under principles 
and with tactics, curiously similar to those of human com- 
munities. 

When a strong plant advancing its frontiers comes upon 
a nation of feeble folk, it simply falls upon it pell-mell, 
relying upon mere brute strength to crush opposition. But 
when two plants, equally hardy, come in contact, and the 
necessity for more expansion compels them to fight, they bring 
into action all the science and skill of old gladiators and Ger- 
man war- professors. They push out skirmishers, and draw 
them in, throw out flanking parties, plant outposts, race for 
commanding points, manoeuvre each other out of corners, cut 
off each others' communications with the water, sap and mine 
— in fact go through all the artifices of civilized war. If they 
find themselves well-matched, they eventually make an alli- 
ance, and mingle peacefully with each other, dividing the 
richer spots equally, and going halves in the water. But as a 



Fighting Plants, 26 



o 



rule one gives way to the other, accepts its dominion, and 
gradually accepts a subordinate place or even extirpation. 

Now this lucerne is one of the fightingest plants that 
grows. It is the Norwegian rat among the vegetables, the 
Napoleon of the weeds. Nothing stops it. If it comes 
upon a would-be rival, it either punches its head and walks 
over it, or it sits down to besiege it, drives its own 
roots under the enemy, and compels it to capitulate by 
starvation. Fences and such devices cannot of course keep 
it within bounds, so the lucerne overflows its limits at every 
point, comes down the railway bank, sprouts up in tufts on 
the track, and getting across into the Scythian barbarism of 
the opposite hill-side, advances as with a Macedonian 
phalanx to conquest and universal monarchy. Three times 
a year can the farmer crop it, and there is no fodder in 
the world that beats it. No wonder then that Utah en- 
courages this admirable adventurer. In time it will become 
the Lucerne State. 

And so, passing through fields of lucerne, we reach the 
Hot Springs. From a cleft in a rock comes gushing out an 
ample stream of nearly boiling water as clear as diamonds, 
and so heavily charged with mineral that the sulphuretted 
air, combined with the heat, is sometimes intolerable, while 
the ground over which the water pours becomes in a few 
weeks thickly carpeted with a lovely weed-like growth of 
purest malachite green. Passing across the road, from its 
first pool under the rock, the stream spreads itself out into 
the Hot Springs Lake, where the water soon assimilates in 
temperature to the atmosphere, but possesses, for some 
reason known to the birds, a peculiar attraction for wild- 
fowl, which congregate in great numbers about it. Where 
it issues from the rock no vegetable of course can grow in 
it, and there is a rim all round its edge about, a foot in 



2 64 Sinners and Saints. 

width where the grass and weeds lie brown and dead, 
suffocated by the fumes. The fungoid-hke growth at the 
bottom of the pool exactly resembles a vegetable, but is 
as purely mineral, though sub-aqueous, as the stalactites on 
a cave-roof. 

And so, on again through a wilderness of lucerne, with 
a broad riband of carnation-coloured phlox retreating before 
its advancing borders — past a perpetual succession of cot- 
tages coming at intervals to a head in delightful farming 
hamlets of the true Mormon type — past innumerable 
orchards, and here and there intervals of wild vegetation, 
willows, and cotton-wood, with beds of blue iris, and brakes 
of wild pink roses (such a confusion of beauty !) among 
which the birds and butterflies seem to hold perpetual 
holiday. 

Then Salt Lake comes in sight, lying along under 
the mountains on the left, and on the right the Wasatch 
range closes in, with the upper slopes all misty with grey 
clouds of sage-brush, and the lower vivid with lusty lucerne. 
Each settlement is in turn a delightful repetition of its 
predecessor, meadow and orchard and corn-land alternating, 
with the same pleasant features of wild life, flocks of crimson- 
winged or yellow-throated birds wheeling round the willow 
copses, or skimming across the meadows, bitterns tumbling 
out from among the reeds, doves darting from tree to tree, 
butterflies of exquisite species fluttering among the beds of 
flowers, and overhead in the sky, floating on observant 
wings, the hawk — one of those significant touches of Nature 
that redeems a country-side from Arcadian mawkishness, 
and throws into an over-sweet landscape just that dash of 
sin and suffering that lemons it pleasantly to the taste. 

Round the corner yonder lies Ogden, one of the most 
promising towns of all the West, and as we approach it the 



App7^oaching Ogden, 265 

great expanses of meadow stretching down to the lake and 
the wide alfalfa levels give place to a barren sage veldf^ 
where the sunflower still retains ancestral dominion, and the 
jackass rabbits flap their ears at each other undisturbed by- 
agriculture or by grazing stock. Nestling back into a nook 
of the hills which rise up steeply behind it, and show plainly 
on the front their old water-line of " Lake Bonneville " (of 
which the Great Salt Lake is the shrunken miserable relict), 
lies a pretty settlement, cosily muffled up in clover and fruit 
trees, and then beyond it, across another interval of primeval 
sage, comes into view the white cupola of the Ogden court- 
house. 

Ogden is the meeting-point of the northern and southern 
Utah lines of rail, and, more important still, of the Union 
Pacific and the Central Pacific also. As a "junction town," 
therefore, it enjoys a position which has already made it 
prosperous, and which promises it great wealth in the near 
future. Nature too has been very kind, for the climate is 
one of the healthiest (if statistics may be believed) in the 
world ; and wood and water, and a fertile soil, are all in 
abundance. Fortunately also, the Mormons selected the 
site and laid it out so that the ground-plan is spacious, the 
roadways are ample, the shade-trees profuse, and the drainage 
good. Its central school is, perhaps, the leading one in the 
territory, while in manufactures and industry it will 
probably some day outstrip Salt Lake City, For the visitor 
who does not care about statistics, Ogden has another 
attraction as the centre of a very beautiful canon country, 
and excursions can be made in a single day that will give 
him as exhaustive an idea of the beauties of western hill 
scenery, as he will ever obtain by far more extended trips. 
The Ogden and Weber canons alone exhaust such land- 
scapes, but if the tourist has the time and the will, he may 



266 Sinners and Saints. 

wander away up into the Wasatch range, past Ogden valley 
and many lovely bits of scenery, towards Bear Valley. But 
for myself, having seen nearly all the canons of Utah and 
many of Colorado, I confess that the Weber and Ogden 
would have sufficed for all mere sight-seeing purposes. 

It was in the Ogden refreshment-room, waiting for the 
train for San Francisco, that I saw a performance that 
filled me with astonishment and dismay. It was a man 
eating his dinner. And let me here remark, with al 
possible courtesy, that the American on his travels is the most 
reprehensible eater I have ever seen. In the first place, 
the knives are purposely made blunt — the back and the 
front of the blade being often of the same " sharpness " 
— to enable him to eat gravy with it. The result is that 
the fork (which ottght to be used simply to hold meat steady 
on the plate while being cut with the knife) has to be used 
with great force to wrench off fragments of food. The 
object of the two instruments is thus materially abused, for 
he holds the meat down with the knife and tears it into 
bits with his fork ! Now, reader, don't say 7io. For I 
have been carefully studying travelUng Americans at their 
food (all over the West at any rate), and what I 
say is strictly correct. This abuse of knife and fork 
then necessitates an extraordinary amount of elbow-room, 
for in forcing apart a tough slice of beef the elbows 
have to stick out as square as possible, and the conse- 
quence is, as the proprietor of a hotel told me, only four 
Americans can eat in a space in which six Englishmen will 
dine comfortably. The latter, when feeding, keep their 
elbows to their sides ; the former square them out on the 
line of the shoulders, and at right angles to their sides. 
Having thus got the travelling American into position, watch 
him consuming his food ! He has ordered a dozen " por- 
tions " of as many eatables, and the whole of his meal, after 



The Food-swallowing Trick, 267 

the detestable fashion of the " eating-houses " at which travel- 
lers are fed, is put before him at once. To eat the dozen or 
so different things which he has ordered, he has only one knife 
and fork and one tea-spoon. Bending over the table, he 
sticks his fork into a pickled gherkin, and while munching this 
casts one rapid hawk-like glance over the spread viands, 
and then proceeds to eat. Mehercule ! what a sight it is ! 
He dabs his knife into the gravy of the steak, picks up with 
his fork a piece of bacon, and while the one is going up to his 
mouth, the other is reaching out for something else. He never 
apparently chews his food, but dabs and pecks at the dishes 
one after the other with a rapidity which (merely as a juggling 
trick) might be performed in London to crowded houses 
every day, and with an impartiality that, considered as 
" dining^' is as savage as any meal of Red Indians or of 
Basutos. Dab, dab, peck, peck, grunt, growl, snort ! The 
spoon strikes in every now and then, and a quick sucking-up 
noise announces the disappearance of a mouthful of huckle- 
berries on the top of a bit of bacon, or a spoonful of cus- 
tard-pie on the heels of a radish. It is perfectly prodigious. 
It defies coherent description. But how on earth does he 
swallow ? Every now and then he shuts his eyes, and 
strains his throat ; this, I suppose, is when he swallows, 
for I have seen children getting rid of cake with the same 
sort of spasm. Yet the rapidity with which he shovels in 
his food is a wonder to me, seeing that he has not got any 
" pouch " like the monkey or the pelican. Does he keep 
his miscellaneous food in a " crop ' like a pigeon, or a 
preliminary stomach like the cow, and " chew the cud " 
afterwards at his leisure? I confess I am beaten by it. 
The mixture of his food, if it pleases him, does not annoy 
me, for if a man likes to eat mouthfuls of huckle-berries, 
bacon, apple-pie, pickled mackerel, peas, mutton, gherkins, 
oysters, radishes, tomatoes, custard, and poached eggs (this 



268 Sinners and Saints. 

is a boiia-fide meal copied from my note-book on the spot) 
in indiscriminate confusion, it has nothing to do with me. 
But what I want to know is, why the travelling American 
does not stop to chew his food ; or why, as is invariably the 
case, he will despatch in five minutes a meal for which he 
has half an hour set specially apart? He falls upon his 
food as if he were demented with hunger, as if he were a 
wild thing of prey tearing victims that he hated into pieces ; 
and when the hideous deed is done, he rushes out from the 
scene of massacre with a handful of toothpicks, and leans 
idly against the door-post, as if time were without limit or end ! 
The whole thing is a mystery to me. When I first came 
into the country I used to waste many precious moments 
in gazing at " the fine confused feeding " of my neigh- 
bours at the table, and waiting to see them choke. But 1 
have given that up now. I plod systematically and delibe- 
rately through my one dish, content to find myself always 
the last at the table, with a tumult of empty platters 
scattered all about me. Nothing can choke the travelling 
American. In the meantime, I wish that young man of 
Ogden would exhibit his great eating trick in London. It 
beats Maskelyne and Cook into fits. 

From Ogden northwards the road lies past perpetual 
cottage-farms, separated only by orchards or fields, and 
clustering at intervals into pleasant villages, where the people 
are all busy gathering in their lucerne crops. The same 
profusion of wild-flowers, and exquisite rose-brakes, the same 
abundance of bird and insect life is conspicuous. 

But gradually our road bears away westward from the hills, 
leaving cultivation and cottages to follow the line of irriga- 
tion along their lower slopes, and while to our right the 
narrow-gauge line runs northward up into the Cache Valley, 
the granary of Utah, we trend away to the left. The northern 



Valleys of Abundance, 269 

end of the Salt Lake comes in sight, and the track running 
for a while close to its side gives me a last look at this 
sheet of wonderful water. 

I was sorry to see the last of it, for I was sorry to 
leave Utah and the kind-hearted, simple, hard-working 
Mormon people. But the Lake gradually comes to a 
point, dwindles out into a marsh, and is gone, and as 
we speed away across levels of dreary alkaline ground, we 
can only recall its site by the wild duck streaming across to 
settle for the night in the reeds that grow by its edges. 

Away from Mormon industry, the sage-brush flourishes 
like green bay-trees. To the east, the line of white-walled 
cottages speaks of a civilization which we are leaving be- 
hind us. To the west, the dreary mountains of Nevada 
already herald a region of barren desolation. And so the sun 
begins to set, and in the dim moth-time, as the mists begin 
to blur the outlines of Antelope Island in the Salt Lake, 
the small round-faced owls come out upon the railway 
fencing and chuckle to each other, and crossing the Bear 
River, all ruddy with the sunset, we see the night-hawks 
skimming the water in chase of the creatures of the twi- 
light. 

And so to Corinne, ghastly Corinne, a Gentile failure 
on the very skirts of Mormon success. It had once a 
great carrying-trade, for being at the terminus of the Utah 
Railway, Montana depended upon it for its supphes, and 
bitterly had Montana cause to regret it, for the Corinne 
freight-carriers (I wish I could remember their expressive 
skng name) seemed to think that railway enterprise must 
always terminate at Corinne, and so they carried just what 
they chose, at the price they chose, and when they chose. 
But the railway ran past them one fine day, and so now 
there is Corinne, stranded high and dry, as discreditable a 



270 Sinners and Saints, 

settlement as ever men put together. Without any plan, 
treeless and roadless, the scattered hamlet of crazy-looking 
shanties stands half the year in drifting dust and half the 
year in sticky mud, and the Mormons point the finger of 
scorn at the place the Gentiles used to boast of. And 
Corinne seems to strike the keynote of the succeeding 
country, for cultivation ceases and habitations are not on 
the desolate plain we enter. And so to Promontory and 
then darkness. 

We awake to find ourselves still in calamitous Nevada. 
What heaps of British gold have been sunk in those ugly 
hills in the hope of getting up American silver ! 

But here is Halleck, a government post, and soldiers from 
the barracks are lounging about in uniforms that make 
them look like butcher-boys, and with a drowsy gait tha^ 
makes one suspect them to be burthened with the sadden- 
ing load of yesterday's whisky. Then, after an interval of 
desert, we cross the Humboldt river, thick with the mud of 
melting snows, and, snaking across a plain warted over 
with ant-hills, arrive at Elko. 

It is possible that Allah in his mercy may forgive Elko 
the offal which it put before us for breakfast. For myself, 
mere humanity forbids me to forgive it. But Elko was 
otherwise of interest. A waiter, very black, and, in pro- 
portion to his nigritude, insolent, had triumphed over my 
unconcealed disgust with my food. Yet I turned to him 
civilly and said, " Isn't there a warm spring here which is 
worth going to see ? " 

"iV^," said the negro, " our spring been burned up /" 

" Burned up 1 " I exclaimed in astonishment ; " the spring 
been burned up ! " 

" Yes," said the abominable one, " burned up. Every- 
body know dat.^^ 



The Son of a Cinder. 271 

"Was your mother there ?" I asked courteously, pretend- 
ing not to be exasperated by the blackamoor. 

" My mother ? No. My mother's — " 

" Ah ! " I replied, " I thought she might have been 
burned up at the same time, for you look like the son of a 
cinder." 

My sally— mean effort that it was — was a complete 
triumph, and I left Ham squashed. It proved, of course, 
that it was the wooden shanty at the spring that had been 
burned down, but in any case it was too far off for 
us to go to see. So we consoled ourselves with the In- 
dians, who always gather on the platform at Elko, in the 
assurance of begging or showing their papooses to some 
purpose. Nor were they wrong. I paid a quarter to see 
" the papoose," and got more than my money's worth in 
hearing this poor brown woman talking to her child the 
same sweet nursery nonsense that my own wife talks to 
mine. And the papoose understood it all, and chuckled 
and smiled and looked happy, for all the world as if it 
were something better than a mere Indian baby. Poor little 
Lamanite ! In a year or two it will be strutting about the 
camp with its mimic bow and arrows, striking its mother, 
and sneering at her as " a squaw," and ten years later (if 
the end of the race has not then arrived) may be riding 
with his tribe on some foul errand of murder, while his 
mother carries the lodge-poles and the cooking-pots on 
foot behind the young brave's horse. Imagine a life in 
which begging is the chief dissipation, and horse-stealing 
the only industry ! 

But I can feel a sympathy for the red man. It may 
be true that neither gunpowder nor the Gospel can reform 
him, that his code of morality is radically incurable, that 
he is, in fact, " the red-bellied varmint " that the Western 



272 Simie^'S and Saints, 

man believes him to be. Yet all the same, remembering 
the miracles that British government has worked with the 
Gonds and other seemingly hopeless tribes of India, I en- 
tertain a lurking suspicion that under other and more kindly 
circumstances the Red Indian might have been to-day a 
better thing than he is. 

At any rate, a people cannot be altogether worthless that 
in the deepest depths of their degradation still maintain a 
lofty wild-beast scorn of white men, and think them some- 
thing lower than themselves. And is not pride the noblest 
and the easiest of all fulcrums for a government to work 
on? 

Is it quite certain, for instance, that, given arms, and 
drilled as soldiers, detachments of the tribes, as auxiliaries 
of the regulars, might not do good service at the different 
military posts, in routine duty, of course, and that the 
prestige of such employment would not appeal to the 
military spirit of the tribes at large? What is there at 
Fort Halleck that Indians could not do as well as white 
men? It is a notorious fact, and as old as American 
history, that the red man holds sacred everything that 
his tribe is guarding. Why should not this chivalry, common 
to every savage race on earth, and largely utilized by 
other governments in Asia and in Africa, be turned to 
account in America too, and Indians be entrusted with the 
peace of Indian frontiers ? 

I know well enough that many will think my suggestion 
sentimental and absurd, but fortunately it is just the class 
who think in that way that have no real importance in this 
or in any other country. They are the men who think the 
"critturs " ought to be " used up," and who, when they are in 
the West, *' would as soon shoot an Injun as a coyote." 
These men form a class of which America, when she is 



Are the Indians of no Use ? 273 

three generations older, will have little need for, and who, 
in a more settled community, will find that they must 
either conform to civilization or else "git." There are 
a great number of these coarse, thick-skinned, ignorant 
men floating about on the surface of Western America : for 
Western America still stands in need of men who will do 
the reckless preliminary work of settlement, and shoot each 
other off over a whisky bottle when that work is done. 
Now, these men, and those of a feebler kind who take 
their opinions from them, believe and preach that annihila 
tion of the Indian is the only possible cure for the Indian 
evil. I have heard them say it in public a score of times 
that "the Indian should be wiped clean out." But a 
larger and more generous class is growing up very fast in 
the West, who are beginning to see that the red men are 
really a charge upon them : and that as a great nation they 
must take upon themselves the responsibilities of empire, 
and protect the weaker communities whom a rapidly 
advancing civilization is isolating in their midst. 

But it is a pity that those in authority cannot see their way 
to giving practical effect to. such sentiments, and devise some 
method for utilizing the Indian. For myself, seeing what 
has been done in Asia and in Africa with equally difficult 
tribes, I should be inclined to predict success for an experi- 
ment in military service, if the routine duties of barracks 
and outpost duty, in unnecessary places, can be called 
"military service." 

For one thing, drilled and well-armed Indians would 
very soon put a stop to cow-boy disturbances in Arizona, 
or anywhere else. Or, again, if Indians had been on his 
track, James, the terror of Missouri, would certainly not 
have flourished so long as he did. 

But by this time we have got far past Elko, and the 

T 



274 Sinners aitd Saints, 

train is carrying us through an undulating desert of rabbit- 
bush and greasewood, with dull, barren hills on either hand, 
and then we reach Carlin, another dreadful-looking hamlet 
of the Corinne type, and, alas ! Gentile also, without a tree 
or a road, and nearly every shanty in it a saloon. 

More Indians are on the platform. They are allowed, it 
appears, under the Company's contract with the government, 
to ride free of charge upon the trains, and so the poor 
creatures spend their summer days, when they are not away 
hunting or stealing, in travelling backwards and forwards 
from one station to the next, and home again. This does 
not strike the civilized imagination as a very exhilarating 
pastime, nor one to be contemplated with much enthusiasm 
of enjoyment. Yet the Indians, in their own grave way, 
enjoy it prodigiously. 

Curiously enough, they cannot be persuaded to ride 
anywhere, except on the platforms between the baggage-cars. 
But here they cluster as thick as swarming bees, the 
"bucks" in all the fantastic combination of vermilion, 
tag-rag and nudity, the squaws dragging about ponderous 
bison robes and sheep-skins, and laden with papooses, 
the children, grotesque little imitations of their parents, 
with their playthings in their hands. 

For the " papoose " is a human child after all, and 
the little Shoshonee girls nurse their dolls just as little girls 
in New York do, only, of course, the Red Indian's child 
carries on her back an imitation papoose in an imita- 
tion pannier, instead of wheeling an imitation American 
baby in an imitation American "baby-carriage." I watched 
one of these brown fragments of the great sex that gives 
the world its wives and its mothers, its sweethearts and 
its sisters, and it was quite a revelation to me to hear the 
wee thing crooning to her wooden baby, and hushing it 



Early Cares, 275 



to sleep, and making believe to be anxious as to its health 
and comforts. Yes, and my mind went back on a sudden 
to the nursery, on the other side of the Atlantic, thousands 
of miles away, where another little girl sits crooning over 
her doll of rags and wax, and on her face I saw just the 
same expression of troubled concern as clouded the little 
Shoshonee's brow, and the same affectation of motherlycare. 
So it takes something more than mere geographical 
distance to alter human nature. 



T 2 



276 Sinners and Saints, 



CHAPTER XXII. 

FROM NEVADA INTO CALIFORNIA. 

Of Bugbears — Suggestions as to sleeping-cars — A Bannack chief, his 
hat and his retinue — The oasis of Humboldt — Past Carson Sink — 
A reminiscence of wolves — *' Hard places " — First glimpses of 
California — A corn miracle — Bunch-grass and Bison — From 
Sacramento to Benicia. 

Is a bugbear most bug or bear? I never met one yet 
fairly face to face, for the bugbear is an evasive insect. Nor, 
if I didrntet one, can I say whether I should prefer to find 
it mainly bug or mainly bear. The latter is of various sorts. 
Thus, one, the little black bear of the Indian hills, is about 
as formidable as a portmanteau of the same size. Another, 
the grizzly of the Rockies, is a very unamiable person. His 
temper is as short as his tail ; and he has very little more 
sense of right and wrong than a Land-leaguer. But he 
is not so mean as the bug. You never hear of grizzly 
bears getting into the woodwork of bedsteads and creep- 
ing out in the middle of the night to sneak up the 
inside of your night-shirt. He does not go and cuddle 
himself up flat in a crease of the pillow-case, and then slip 
out edgeways as soon as it is dark, and bite you in the nape 
of the neck. It is not on record that a bear ever got inside 
a nightcap and waited till the gas was turned out, to come 
forth and feed like grief on the damask cheek of beauty. 
No, these are not the habits of bears, they are more 



A few Words about ""' Sleepers!' 277 

« 
manly than bugs. If you want to catch a bear between 
your finger and thumb, and hold it over a lighted match on 
the point of a pin, it will stand still to let you try. Or if 
you want to have a good fair slap at a bear with a slipper, 
it won't go flattening itself out in the crevices of furniture, 
in order to dodge the blow, but will stand up square in the 
road, in broad daylight, and let you do it. So, on the whole, 
I cannot quite make up my mind whether bugs or bears are 
the worst things to have about a house. You see you could 
shoot at the bear out of the window ; but it would be 
absurd to fire off rifles at bugs between the blankets. 
Besides, bears don't keep you awake all night by leaving 
you in doubt as to whether they are creeping about the bed 
or not, or spoil your night's rest by making you sit up and 
grope about under the bed-clothes and try to see things 
in the dark. Altogether, then, there is a good deal to be 
said on the side of the bear. 

I am led to these remarks by remembering that at Carlin, 
in Nevada, 1 found two bugs in my " berth " in the sleeping- 
car. The porter thought I must have " brought them with 
me." Perhaps I did, but, as I told him, I didn't remember 
doing so, and with his permission would not take them any 
further. Or perhaps the Shoshonees brought them. All 
Indians, whether red or brown, are indifferent to these 
insects, and carry them about with them in familiar abun- 
dance. 

- And this reminds me to say a little about sleeping-cars 
in general. During my travels in America I have used three 
kinds, the Pullman Palace, the Silver Palace, and the 
Baltimore and Ohio, and except in " high tone," and finish 
of ornament, where the Pullman certainly excels the rest, 
there is very little to choose between them. All are ex- 
tremely comfortable as sleeping-cars. In the Silver Palace, 



278 Sinners and Saints. 

however, there is a custom prevalent of not pulHng down 
the upper berth when it is unoccupied, and this improve- 
ment on the PuUman plan is certainly very great. The two 
shelves, one at each end of the berth, are ample for one's 
clothes, while the sense of relief and better ventilation from 
not having the bottom of another bedstead suspended 
eighteen inches or so above your face is decidedly conducive 
to better rest. The general adoption of this practice, 
wherever possible, would, I am sure, be popular among 
passengers. As day-cars^ the " sleepers " have one or two 
defects in common, which might very easily be remedied. 
For one thing, every seat should have a removable head- 
rest belonging to it. As it is, the weary during the day 
become very weary indeed, and the attempts of passengers 
to rest their heads by curling themselves up on the seats, or 
lying crosswise in the " section," are as pathetic as they are 
often absurd, and give a Palace car the appearance, on a 
hot afternoon, of a ward in some Hospital for Spinal Com- 
plaints. Another point that should be altered is the hour 
for closing the smoking-room. When not required for 
berths for passengers (for the company's employes ought 
not to be considered when the convenience of the company's 
customers is in question) there is no reason whatever for 
closing the smoking-room at ten. As a rule it is not closed ; 
but sometimes it is ; and it should not be placed in the power 
of a surly conductor — and there are too many ill-mannered 
conductors on the railways —to annoy passengers by apply- 
ing such a senseless regulation. A third point is the apple- 
and-newspaper-boy nuisance. This wretched creature, if 
of an enterprising kind, pesters you to purchase things 
which you have no intention of purchasing, and if you 
express any annoyance at his importunity, he is insolent. 
But apart from his insolence, he is an unmitigated nuisance. 
What should be done is this : a printed slip, such as the 



Apple-and-Newspaper-Boy Nuisance, 279 

boy himself carries and showing what he sells, should be 
put on to the seats by the porter, and when any passenger 
wants an orange or a book, he could send for the vendor. 
But the vendor should be absolutely forbidden to parade 
his wares in the sleeping-cars, unless sent for. Anywhere 
else, except on a train, he would be handed over to the 
police for his importunities ; but on the train he considers 
himself justified in badgering the pubhc, and impertinently 
resents being ordered away. These are three small matters, no 
doubt, but changes in the direction I have suggested would 
nevertheless materially increase the comfort of passengers. 

And now let me see. When I fell into these digres- 
sions I had just said good-bye to the Mormons and 
Mormonland, and had got as far into Nevada as Carlin. 
From there a dismal interval of wilderness brings the 
traveller to Palisade, a group of wooden saloons haunted by 
numbers of yellow Chinese. In the few minutes that the 
train stopped here, I saw a curious sight. 

A number of our Shoshonee passengers — the " deadheads " 
on the platform between the baggage-cars — had got off, 
and one of them was the. squaw that had the papoose. 
As she sat down and unslung her infant from her back, a 
group gathered round her — one Englishman, one negro, three 
mulattoes, and a Chinaman. And they were all laughing at 
the Indian. Not one of them all, not even the negro, but 
thought himself entitled to make fun of her and her baby ! 
The white man looks down on the mulatto, and the 
mulatto on the negro, and the negro and the Chinaman 
reciprocate a mutual disdain ; yet here they were, all four 
together, on a common platform, loftily ridiculing the 
Shoshonee ! It was a delightful spectacle for the cynic. 
But I am no cynic, and yet I laughed heartily at them all — 
at them all except the Shoshonee. 

I cannot, for the life of me, help venerating these repre- 



28o Sinners and Saints. 

sentatives of aprodigious antiquity, these relics of a civiliza- 
tion that dates back before our Flood. 

Then we reach the Humboldt River, a broad and full- 
watered stream, lazily winding along among ample meadows 
But not a trace of cultivation anywhere. And then on to the 
desert again with the surface of the alkali land curling up 
into flakes, and the lank grey greasewood sparsely scattered 
about it. The desolation is as utter as in Beluchistan or the 
Land of Goshen, and instead of Murrees there are plenty of 
Shoshonees to make the desolation perilous to travellers by 
waggon. At Battle Creek station they are mustered in quite 
a crowd, listless men with faces like masks and women 
burnished and painted and wooden as the figure-heads ot 
English barges. I do not think that in all my travels, in Asia 
or in Africa, or in the islands of eastern or southern seas, I 
have ever met a race with such a baffling physiognomy. 
You can no more tell from his face what an Indian is think- 
ing of than you can from a monkey's. Their eyes brighten 
and then glaze over again without a Avord being spoken or a 
muscle of the face moved, and they avert their glance as 
soon as you look at them. If you look into an Indian's 
eyes, they seem to deaden, and all expression dies out of 
them ; but the moment you begin to turn your head away, 
you are conscious of the rapid furtive glance that they dart 
at you. They are hieroglyphics altogether, and there is 
something " uncanny " about them. 

At Battle Creek we note that (with irrigation) trees will 
grow, but in a few minutes we are out again on the wretched 
desert, the eternal greasewood being the only apology 
for vegetation, and little prairie owls the only representatives 
of wild life. And so to Winnemucca, where, being watered, 
a few trees are growing ; but the desolation is nevertheless 
so complete that I could not help thinking of the difference 



A Bam lack Chief, 281 



a little Mormon industry would make ! A company of 
Bannack Indians were waiting here for the train, and such 
a wonderful collection as they were ! One of them was the 
chief who not long ago gave the Federal troops a good deal 
of trouble, and his retinue was the most delightful medley 
of curiosities — a long thin man with the figure of a lamp- 
post, a short fat one with the expression of a pancake, a 
half-breed with a beard, and a boy with a squint. The chief, 
with a face about an acre in width, wore a stove-pipe hat 
with the crown knocked out and the opening stuffed full of 
feathers, but the rest of his wonderful costume, all flapping 
about him in ends and fringes of all colours and very dirty, 
is indescribable. His suite were in a more sober garb, but all 
were grotesque, their headgear being especially novel, and 
showing the utmost scorn of the hatter's original inten- 
tions. ' Some wore their hats upside down and strapped 
round the chin with a ribbon ; others inside out, with a 
fringe of their own added on behind — but it was enough to 
make any hatter mad to look at them. 

They travelled with us across the next interval of howling 
wilderness, and got out to promenade at Humboldt, where 
we got out to dine — and, as it proved, to dine well. 

Humboldt is an exquisite oasis in the hideous Nevada 
waste. A fountain plays before the hotel door, and on 
either side are planted groves of trees, poplar and locust 
and willow, with the turf growing green beneath them, and 
roses scattered about. 

No wonder that all the birds and butterflies of the neigh- 
bourhood collect at such a beautiful spot, or that travellers 
go away grateful, not only for the material benefits of a good 
meal, but the pleasures of green trees and running water 
and the song of birds. An orchard, with lucerne strong 
and thick beneath them, promises a continuance of culti- 



282 Sinners and Saints, 

vation, but on a sudden it stops, and we find ourselves out 
again on the alkali plain, as barren and blistered as the 
banks of the Suez Canal. A tedious hour or two brings us 
to the river again ; but man here is not agricultural, so the 
deseit continues in spite of abundant water. And so to 
Lovelocks, where girls board the train as if they were 
brigands, urging us to buy " sweet fresh milk — five cents a 
glass." Indians, as usual, are lounging about on the plat- 
form, and some more of them get on to the train, and away 
we go again into the same Sahara as before. Humboldt 
Lake, the " sink " where the river disappears from the sur- 
face of the earth, and a distant glimpse of Carson's '•' Sink," 
hardly relieve the desperate monotony, for they are hideous 
levels of water without a vestige of vegetation, and close 
upon them comes as honest a tract of desert as even Africa 
can show, and with no more " features " on it than a plate 
of cold porridge has. A wolf goes limping off in a three- 
legged kind of way, as much as to say that, having to live in 
such a place, it didn't much care whether we caught it or not ; 
and what a contrast to the pair of wolves I remember meet- 
ing one morning in Afghanistan ! 

I was riding a camel and looking away to my right across 
the plain. I saw coming towards me, over the brushwood, 
in a series of magnificent leaps, a couple of immense wolves. 
I knew that wolves grew sometimes to a great size, but I had 
no idea that, even with their winter fur on, they could be 
so large as these were. 

And there was a majesty about their advance that fas- 
cinated me, for every bound, though it carried them twelve 
or fifteen feet, was so free and light that they seemed to 
move by machinery rather than by prodigious strength of 
muscle. But it suddenly occurred to me that they were 
crossing my path, and I saw, moreover, that our relative 



Wolves, 283 



speeds, if maintained, might probably bring us into actual 
collision at the point of intersection. But it was not for me 
to yield the road, and the wolves thought it was not for them. 
And so we approached, the wolves keeping exact time and 
leaping together, as if trained to do it, and then, with- 
out swerving a hair's-breadth from their original course 
they bounded across the path only a few feet behind my 
camel. It was superb courage on their part, and as an 
episode of wild-beast life, one of the most picturesque and 
dramatic I ever witnessed. 

The next station we halted at was Wadsworth, a " hard 
place," so men say, where revolvers are in frequent use and 
Lynch is judge. Here the broad-faced Bannack chief got 
down, and, followed by his tag-rag retinue, disappeared into 
the cluster of wigwams which we saw pitched behind the 
station. I noticed a' man standing here with a splendid 
cactus in his hand, covered with large magenta blossoms, 
and this reminded me to»note the conspicuous change in 
the botany that about here takes place. The flowers that 
had borne us company all through Utah and now 
and then brightened the roadside in Nevada had disap- 
peared, and were replaced by others of species nearly all 
new to me. I saw here for the first time a golden- 
flowered cactus and a tall lavender-coloured spiraea of 
singular beauty. A little beyond Wadsworth the change 
becomes even more marked, for striking the Truckee river, 
we exchange desolation for pretty landscape, and the desert 
for green bottom lands. The alteration was a welcome one, 
and some of the glimpses, even if we had not passed through 
such a melancholy region, would have claimed our admira- 
tion on their own merits. The full-fed river poured along 
a rapid stream, through low-lying meadow-lands fringed with 
tall cotton-wood, the valley sometimes narrowing so much 



284 Sinners and Saints. 

that the river took up all the room, and then widening out 
so as to admit of large expanses of grass and occasional 
fields of corn. And so to Greeno, where we supped 
heartily off " Truckee trout," one of the best fish that ever 
wagged a fin. As we got back into the cars it was getting 
dark, for with the usual luck of travel the Central Pacific 
has to run its trains so as to give passengers ugly Nevada 
by day and beautiful California by night. 

Awaking next morning was a wonderful surprise. We 
had gone to sleep in Nevada in early summer, and we awoke 
in California late in autumn ! In Utah, two days ago, the 
crops had only just begun to flush the ground with green. 
Here, to-day, the corn-fields were the sun-dried stubble of 
crops that had been cut weeks ago ! 

And the first glimpses of it were fortunate ones, for when 
I awoke it was in a fine park-like, undulating country, 
studded with clumps of oak-trees, but one continuous corn- 
field. Great mounds of straw and stacks of corn dotted 
the landscape as far as the eye could see, and already the 
fields were alive with carts and men all busy with the splendid 
harvest. After a while came vast expanses of meadow, 
prettily timbered, in which great flocks of sheep and herds 
of cattle were grazing, " ranches " such as I had never seen 
before. And then we passed some houses, broad-eaved and 
verandahed, with capacious barns standing in echelon be- 
hind, and all the signs of an ample prosperity, deep shaded 
in walnut-trees laden with nuts, overrun by vines "already 
heavy with clusters, and brightened by clumps of oleanders 
ruddy with blossom. And then came the corn-fields again, 
an unbroken expanse of stubble, yellow as the sea-sand, and 
seemingly as interminable. What a country ! It is a 
kingdom in itself. 

And its rivers ! The American River soon came in sight, 



An ill-mannered Conductor. 285 

rolling its stately flood along between brakes of willow and 
elder, and aspen, and then the Sacramento, a noble stream. 
And the two conspire and join together to take liberties 
with the solid earth, swamp it into bulrush beds by the 
league together, and create such jungles as almost rival 
the great Himalaya Terai. And so to Sacramento. 

Sacramento was e7i fete, for it was the race week. So 
bunting was flapping from every conspicuous point, and 
everything and everybody wore a whole holiday, morning- 
cocktail, go-as-you-please sort of look. This fact may 
account for the very ill-mannered conductor who boarded 
us here. 

I am sitting in the smoking-car. Enter conductor with 
his mouth too full of tobacco to be able to speak. He points 
at me with his thumb. I take no notice of his thumb. He 
spits in the spittoon at my feet and jerks his thumb to- 
wards me again. I disregard his thumb. ^^ Ticket!" he growls. 
I give him my ticket. He punches it and thrusts it back 
to me so carelessly and suddenly that it falls on the floor. 
He takes no notice, but passes on into the car. I take out 
my pocket-book and make a note : — 

" Such a man as this goes some way towards discrediting 
the administration of a whole line. It seems a pity there- 
fore to retain his services." 

However, of Sacramento, I was very sorry not to be able 
to stay there, for next to the Los Angeles country I had 
been told that it was one of the finest ''locations" in all 
California, and I can readily believe it, for the botany 
of the place is sub-tropical, and snow and sunstroke are 
equally unknown. Fruits of all kinds grow there in delight- 
ful abundance, and I cherish it therefore as a personal 
grudge against Sacramento that there was not even a black- 
berry procurable at breakfast. 



286 Sinners and Saints. 

Passing from Sacramento, and remarking as we go, the 
patronage which that vegetable impostor, the eucalyptus 
globulus (or " blue-gum " of Australia) has secured, both as 
an ornamental — save the mark ! — and a shade-tree, two pur- 
poses for which by itself the eucalyptus is specially unfitted, 
we find ourselves once more in a world given up to har- 
vesting. A monotonous panorama of stubble and standing 
crops, with clumps of pretty oak timber studding the undu- 
lating land, leads us to the diversified approaches to San 
Francisco. 

It is old travellers' ground, but replete with the interest 
which attaches to variety of scenery, continual indications 
of vast wealth, and a rapidly growing prosperity. But 
one word, before we reach the town, for that wonderful 
natural crop — the " wild oats," which clothe every vacant 
acre of the country on this Pacific v/atershed with har- 
vests as close and as regular as if the land had been tilled, 
and the ground sown, by human agency. This surprising 
plant is said to have been brought to California by the 
Spaniards, and to have run wild from the original fields. 
But whatever its origin, it is now growing in such vast 
prairies that whole tribes of Indians used to look to it 
as the staple of their food. But better crops are fast 
displacing it, and as for the Indian, California no longer 
belongs to him or his bison-herds. Further east, that 
is to say, from the Platte Valley to the Sierra Nevada, 
the " bunch grass " was the great natural provision for the 
wild herds of the wild man, and it still ranks as one of the 
most valuable features of otherwise barren regions in Colo- 
rado, Utah, and Nevada. To the student of Nature, how- 
ever, it is far more interesting as one of the mo'st beautiful 
examples of her kindly foresight, for the bunch grass grows 
where nothing else can find nourishment, and just when all 



Features of Travel, 287 



other grasses are useless as fodder, it throws out young 
juicy shoots, thrives under the snow, and then in May, when 
other grasses are abundant, it dies ! Somebody has said that 
without the mule and the pig America would never have 
been colonized. That may be as it may be. But the real 
pioneer of the West was the bison, for the first emigrants 
followed exactly in the footsteps of the retiring herds, and 
these in their turn grazed their way towards the Pacific in 
the line of the bunch grass. 

Mount Diavolo is the first "feature" that arouses the 
traveller's inquisitiveness, and then the Martines Straits with 
their yellow waters spread out at the feet of rolling, yellow 
hills, and then great mud flats on which big vessels lie 
waiting for the tide to come and float them on, and then a 
bay which, with its girdle of hills and its broad margin, 
reminds me of Durban in Natal. So to Benicia, the place 
of "the Boy," with the blacksmith's forge where Heenan 
used to work still standing near the water's edge, and 
where the hammer that the giant used to use is still pre- 
served " in memoriam," and then on to the ferry-boat (train 
ar^d all !) and across a bay of brown water and brown mud 
and brown hills — dismally remindful of Weston-super-Mare 
— and on to dry land again^ past Berkley, with its college 
among the trees, Oakland, and other suburban resorts of the 
San Franciscan, to the fine new three-storeyed Station at the 
pier. Once more on to the ferry-boat, but this time leaving 
our train behind us and across another bay, and so into 
San Francisco. Outside the station stands a crowd of 
chariot-like omnibuses, as gorgeously coloured, some of 
them, as the equipages of a circus, and empanelled with 
gaudy pictures. In one of them we find our proper seats, 
and are soon bumping over the cobble-stones into "the 
most wonderful city, sir, of America." 



288 Sinners and Saints, 



CHAPTER XXIII. 

San Franciscans, their fruits and their falsehoods — Their neglect of 
opportunities — A plague of flies — The pig-tail problem — China- 
men less black than they are painted — The seal rocks — The loss 
of the Eii7ydice — A jeweller's fairyland — The mystery of gems. 

Somebody has poked fun at San Francisco, by calling it 
"the Venice of the West," and then qualifying the compli- 
ment by explaining that the only resemblance between the 
two cities is in the volume and variety of the disagreeable 
smells that prevail in them. But the San Franciscans take 
no notice of this explanation. They accept the comparison 
in its broadest sense, and positively expect you to see ,a 
resemblance between their very wonderful, but very new 
town, and Venice! Indeed, there is no limit to the San 
Franciscan's expectations from a stranger. 

Now, I was sitting in the hotel one day and overheard a 
couple of San Franciscans bragging in an off-hand way to 
a poor wretch who had been brought up, I should guess, 
in New Mexico, and calmly assuring him that there was 
no place "in the world" of greater beauty than San 
Francisco, or of more delicious fruit. I pretended to fall 
into the same easy credulity myself, and drew them on to 
making such monstrous assertions as that San Francisco 
was a revelation of beauty to all travellers, and the perfec- 



Fruits and Falsehoods, 289 

tion of its fruit a never-ceasing delight to them ! I then 
ventured deferentially to inquire what standard of compari- 
son they had for their self-laudation, what other countries 
they had visited, and what fruits they considered California 
produced in such perfection. Now, it turned out that these 
three impostors had never been out of America : in fact, 
that, except for short visits on business to the Eastern 
States, they had never been out of California and Nevada ! 
I then assured them that, for myself, I had seen, in 
America alone, many places far more beautiful, while " in 
the world " I knew of a hundred with which San Francisco 
should not venture to compare itself As for its fruits, there 
was not in its market, nor in its best shops, a single thing 
that deserved to be called first-class. From the watery 
cherries to the woolly apricots, every fruit was as flavour- 
less as it dared to be, while, as a whole, they were so 
second-rate that they could not have found a sale in the best 
shops of either Paris or London. The finest fruit, to my mind, 
was a small but well-flavoured mango, imported from Mexico. 
Its flavour was almost equal to that of the langi-a of the 
Benares district, or the green mango of Burmah; and if the 
Maldah was grafted on to this Mexican stock, the result 
would probably be a fruit that would be as highly prized 
in New York and in England, as it is all over Asia. But 
very few people in San Francisco ever buy mangoes. " No, 
sir," I said at last to the barbarian who had been im- 
posed upon ; " don't you believe any one who tells you 
that San Francisco is the most lovely spot on earth, 
or that its fruits are extraordinary in flavour. San Fran- 
cisco is a wonderful city; it is the Wonder of the West. 
But you must not believe all that San Franciscans tell 
you about it." 

It is a great pity that San Franciscans should have this 

u 



290 Sinners and Saints, 

weakness. They have plenty to be proud of, for their city 
is a marvel. But it has as yet all the disadvantages of 
newness. Its population, moreover, is as disagreeably un- 
settled as in the towns of the Levant. All the mud and 
dirt are still in suspension. I know very well, of course, 
that improvement is making immense and rapid strides, 
but to the visitor the act of transition is, of course, invisible, 
and he only sees the place at a period of apparent repose 
between the last point of advance and the next. He can 
/w^^/;/^ anything he pleases— and it is difficult to imagine the 
full splendour of the future of the Californian capital. But 
this is not what he actually sees. For myself, then, I found 
San Francisco as so many other travellers have described it, 
disorderly, breathless with haste, unkempt. Here and there, 
where trees have been planted, and there is the grace of 
flowers and creeping plants, the houses look as if rational 
people might really live in them. But for the vast majority 
of the buildings, they seem merely places to lodge in, dak- 
bungalows or rest-houses, perches for passing swallows, any- 
thing you like — except houses to pass one's life in. They are 
not merely wooden, but they are sham too, with their im- 
posing " fronts " nailed on to the roofs to make them look 
finer, just as vulgar women paste curly '' bangs " on to the 
fronts of their heads. There is also an inexcusable dearth 
of ornament. I say inexcusable, because San Francisco 
might be a perfect paradise of flowers and trees. Even the 
" weeds " growing on the sand dunes outside the city are 
flowers that are prized in European gardens. But as it is, 
Francois Jeannot, — " French gardener, with general enter- 
prise of gardens," as his signboard states, — has evidently 
very little to do. There is little " enterprise of gardens." 
Yet what exquisite flowers there are ! The crimson 
salvia grows in strong hedges, and plots are fenced in 



Neglect of Opportunities, 2 9 1 

with geraniums. The fuchsias are sturdy shrubs in which 
birds might build their nests, and the roses and jessamines 
and purple clematis of strange, large-blossomed kinds, form 
natural arbours of enchanting beauty. Lobelias spread out 
into large cushions of a royal blue, and the canna, wherever 
sown, sends up shafts of vivid scarlet, orange, and yellow. 

If I only knew the names of other plants I could fill 
a page with descriptions of the wonderful luxuriance of 
San Franciscan flowers. But all I could say would only 
emphasize the more clearly the apparent neglect by the 
San Franciscans of the floral opportunities they possess. 

It is curious how enthusiastic California has been in its 
reception of the eucalyptus globulus, the blue-gum tree 
of Australia. And I am afraid there has been some 
job put upon the San Franciscans in this matter. Has 
anybody, with a little speculation in blue-gums on hand, 
been telling them that the eucalyptus was a wonderful 
drainer of marshes and conqueror of fevers ? If so, it is 
a pity they had not heard that that hoax was quite played 
out in Europe, and the eucalyptus shown to be an im- 
postor. Or were they told of its stately proportions, its 
rapid growth, its beautiful foliage, and its splendid shade ? 
If so, that hoax will soon expose itself. Given a site where 
no wind blows, the eucalyptus will grow straight, but offered 
the smallest provocation it flops off to one side or the 
other, while its foliage is liable probably beyond that of all 
other trees to discoloration and raggedness. In Natal it 
has proved itself very useful as fencing, for neither wood 
nor stone being procurable, slips and shreds of eucalyptus 
have soon grown up into perm.anent hedges. But no 
one thinks of valuing it anywhere, except in Australia, 
either for its timber, its appearance, or its medicinal virtues. 

In many ways the Queen of the Pacific was a surprise ; 
u 2 



292 Sinners and Saints, 



I had expected to find it "semi-tropical." It is nothing 
of the kind. Women were wearing furs every afternoon 
(in June) because of the chill wind that springs up about 
three o'clock, and men walked about with great-coats over 
their arms ready for use. The architecture of the city is 
not so "semi-tropical" as that of suburban New York, 
while vegetation, instead of being rampant, is conspicuously 
absent. Three women out of every four wore very thick 
veils, but why they were so thick I could not discover. In 
hot countries they do not wear them, nor in " semi-tropical." 
Perhaps they were vestiges of some recent visitation of 
dust, which appears to be sometimes as prodigious here as 
it is in Pietermaritzburg. But they might, very properly, 
have been an armour against the flies which swarmed in 
some parts of the town in hideous multitudes. I went into 
a large restaurant, the " Palace " something it was called, 
with the intention of eating, but I left without doing so, ap- 
palled by the plague of flies. I found Beelzebub very power- 
ful in Washington, and at some of " the eating places " in 
the South his hosts were intolerable ; but San Francisco 
has streets as completely given over to the fly-fiend as an 
Alexandrian bazaar. 

Before I went to San Francisco, I had an idea that a 
"Chinese question" was agitating the State of California, 
that every white man was excited about the expulsion ot 
the heathen, that it was the topic of the day, and that pas- 
sion ran high between the rival populations. I very soon 
found that I had been mistaken, and that there is really 
no " Chinese question " at all in California. At least, 
the one question now is, how to evade the late bill stop- 
ping Chinese immigration ; and it was gleefully pointed out 
to me that though the importation of Celestials by sea was 
prohibited, there was no provision to prevent them being 



The Chinese Question, 293 

brought into the State by land ; and that the numbers 
of the arrivals would not probably diminish in the least ! 

I had intended to " study " the Chinese question. But 
there is not much study to be done over a ghost. Besides, 
every Californian manufacturer is agreed on the main 
points, that Chinese labour is absolutely necessary, that 
there is not enough of it yet in the State, that more 
still must be obtained. And where a '' problem " is granted 
on all hands, it is hardly worth while affecting to search for 
profound social, political, or economical complication in it. 
There is not much more mystery about it than about the 
nose on a man's face. 

Of course those who organized the clamour have what 
they call " arguments," but they are hardly such as can com- 
mand respect. In the first place they allege 'two appre- 
hensions as to the future : i. That the Chinese, if un- 
restricted, will swamp the Americans in the State ; and 2. 
That they will demoralize those Americans. Now the first 
is, I take it, absurd, and if it is not, then California ought 
to be ashamed of itself. And as for the second, who can 
have any sympathy with a State that is unable to enforce its 
police regulations, or with a community in which parents 
say they cannot protect the purity of their households ? If 
the Chinaman, as a citizen, disregards sanitary bye-laws, 
why is he not punished, as he would be everywhere else : 
and if as a domestic servant he misbehaves, why is he 
not dispensed with, as he would be everywhere else ? 

Besides these two apprehensions as to the future, they 
have three objections as to the present. The first is, that 
the Chinese send their earnings out of the country; the 
second, that they spend nothing in San Francisco; the 
third, that they underwork white men. Now the first is 
foolish, the second and the third, I believe, untrue. As 



294 Sinners and Saints, 

to the Chinese carrying money out of the country — why 
should they not do so ? Will any one say seriously that 
America, a bullion-producing country, is injured by the 
Chinese taking their money earnings out of the States, in 
exchange for that which America cannot produce, namely, 
labour? Is political economy to go mad simply to suit the 
sentiment of extra-white labour in California ? 

As to the Chinese spending nothing in this country, this 
is hardly borne out by facts, and, in the mouths of San Fran- 
ciscans, specially unfortunate. For they have not only 
raised their prices upon the Chinese, but have actually for- 
bidden them to spend their money in those directions in 
which they wished to do so. As it is, however, they spend, 
in exorbitant rents, taxes, customs-dues, and in direct ex- 
penditure, a perfectly sufficient share of their earnings, and 
if permitted to do so, would spend a great deal more. A 
ludicrous superstition, that the Chinese are ecofio7?ikaI , un- 
derlies many of the misstatements put forward as " argu- 
ments " against them. Yet they are not economical. On 
the contrary, the Chinese and the Japanese are exceptional 
among Eastern races for their natural extravagance. 

It is further alleged that they underwork white men. 
This statement will hardly bear testing; for the wages of 
a Chinese workman, in the cigar trade, for instance, are not 
lower than those of a white man, say, in Philadelphia. They 
do not, therefore, " underwork " the white man ; but they 
do undoubtedly underwork the white Califor7iian. For the 
white Californian will not work at Eastern rates. On the 
contrary, he wishes to know whether you take him for " a 

fool," to think that he, in California, is going to 

accept the same wages that he could have stopped in New 
York for ! Yet why should he not do so ? It will 
hardly be urged that the Californian Irishman is a superior 



Among the Celestials, 295 

individual to the Eastern American, or that the average 
San Franciscan workman is any better than the men of his 
own class on the Atlantic coast ? Yet the Californian claims 
higher wages, and abuses the Chinese for working at rates 
which white men are elsewhere glad to accept. He says, 
too, that living is dearer. Facts disprove this. As a matter 
of fact, living is cheaper in San Francisco than in either 
Chicago or New York. 

How did I spend my time in San Francisco? Well, 
friends were very kind to me, and I saw everything that a 
visitor '' ought to see." But after my usual fashion I wan- 
dered about the streets a good deal alone, and rode up and 
down in the street-cars, and I had half a mind at first to be 
disappointed with the city of which I had heard so much. 
But later in the evening, when the gas was alight and the 
pavement had its regular habitues, and the pawnbrokers' 
and bankrupts'-stock stores were all lit up, I saw what a 
wild, strange city it was. Indeed, I know of no place in 
the world more full of interesting incidents and stirring 
types than this noisy, money-spending San Francisco. 

One night, of course, I spent several hours in the Chinese 
quarter, and I cannot tell why, but I took a great fancy to 
the Celestial, as he is to be seen in San Francisco. Poli- 
tically, nationally, and commercially, I hate Pekin and all 
its works. But individually I find the Chinaman, all the 
world over, a quiet-mannered, cleanly-living, hard-working 
servant. And in all parts of the world, except California, 
my estimate of Johnnie is the universal one. In Califor- 
nia, however, so the extra- white people say, he is a dangerous, 
dirty, demoralizing heathen. And there is no doubt of it 
that, in the Chinese quarter of the city, he is crowded into a 
space that would be perilous to the health of men accustomed 
to space and ventilation, but I was told by a Chinaman that 



296 Sinners and Saints, 

he and his people had been prevented by the city authorities 
from expanding into more commodious lodgings. As for 
cleanliness, I have travelled too much to forget that this 
virtue is largely a question of geography, and that, espe- 
cially in matters of food, the habits of Europeans are con- 
sidered by half the world so foul as to bring them within 
the contempt of a hemisphere. As regards personal cleanli- 
ness, the Chinese are rather scrupulous. 

But I wonder San Francisco does not build a China- 
town, somewhere in the breezy suburbs, and lay a tramway to 
it for the use of the Chinamen, and then insist upon its sani- 
tary regulations being properly observed. San Francisco 
would be rather surprised at the result. For the settlements 
of the Chinese are very neat and cleanly in appearance, 
and the people are very fond of curious gardening and 
house-ornamentation. The Chinese themselves would be 
only too glad to get out of the centre of San Francisco 
and the quarters into which they are at present compelled 
to crowd, while their new habitations would very soon be 
one of the most attractive sights of all the city. As it is, it 
is picturesque, but it is of necessity dirty — after the fashion 
of Asiatic dirtiness. Smells that seem intolerable assail the 
visitor perpetually, but after all they were better than the 
smell from an eating-house in Kearney Street which we 
passed soon after, and where creatures of Jewish and 
Christian persuasions were having fish fried. I am not 
wishing to apologize for the Chinese. I hate China with 
a generous Christian vindictiveness, and think it a great 
pity that dismemberment has not been forced upon that 
empire long ago as a punishment for her massacres of 
Catholics, and her treason generally against the commerce 
and polity of Europe. But I cannot forget that California 
owes much to the Chinese. 



Sea Lions, 297 



Next to the Chinese, I found the sea-Uons the most inte- 
resting feature of San Francisco. To reach them, however (if 
you do not wish to indulge the aboriginal hackman with an 
opportunity for extortion), you have to undergo a long drive 
in a series of omnibuses and cars, but the journey through 
the sand-waste outskirts of the city is thoroughly instructive, 
for the intervals of desert remind you of the original con- 
dition of the country on which much of San Francisco has 
been built, while the intervals of charming villa residences 
in oases of gardens, show what capital can do, even with 
only sea-sand to work upon. We call Ismailia a wonder — 
but what is Ismailia in comparison with San Francisco ! 
After a while solid sand dunes supervene, beautiful, how- 
ever, in places with masses of yellow lupins, purple rocket, 
and fine yellow-flowered thistles, and then the broad sea 
comes into sight, and so to the Cliff House. 

Just below the House, one of the most popular resorts 
of San Francisco, the " Seal Rocks " stand up out of 
the water, and it is certainly one of the most interesting 
glimpses of wild life that the whole world affords to see the 
herds of " sea-lions " clambering and sprawling about their 
towers of refuge. For Government has forbidden their 
being killed, so the huge creatures drag about their bulky 
slug-shaped bodies in confident security. It would not be 
very difficult I should think for an amateur to make a sea- 
lion. There is very little shape about them. But, never- 
theless, it is such a treat as few can have enjoyed twice 
in their lives to see these mighty ones of the deep basking 
on the sunny rocks, and ponderously sporting in the 
water. 

And looking out to sea, beyond the sea-lions, I saw a 
spar standing up out of the water. It was the poor Escam- 
bia that had sunk there the day before, and there, on the 



298 Sinners and Saints. 

beach to the left of the Cliff House, was the spot where the 
three survivors of the crew managed to make good their 
hold in spite of the pitiless surf, and to clamber up out of 
reach of the waves. And all through the night, with the 
lights of the Cliff House burning so near them, the men 
lay there exhausted with their struggle. It was a strange 
wreck altogether. When she left port, every one who saw 
her careening over said " she must go down ;" every one 
who passed her said "she must go down;" the pilot left 
her, saying "she must go down ;" the crew came round the 
captain, saying "she 7nust go down." But the skipper 
held on his way awhile, and at last he too turned to his 
mate ; " she must go down," he said. Then he tried to head 
her to port again, but a wave caught her broadside as she 
was clumsily answering the helm ; and while the coastguard, 
who had been watching her through his glass, turned for 
a moment to telephone to the city that "she 7nust go 
down," — she did. When he put up the glasses to his eyes 
again, there was no Esca??ibia in sight ! She had gone down. 
And the sight of that lonely spar, signalling so patheti- 
cally m the desolate waste of waves the spot of the ship's 
disaster, brought back to my mind a Sunday in Ventnor, 
where the people of the town, looking out across to sea, 
stood to watch the beautiful Eurydice go by in her full 
pomp of canvas. A bright sun glorified her, and her crew, 
met for Divine Service, were returning thanks to Heaven 
for the prosperous voyage they had made. And suddenly 
over Dunnose there rushed up a dark bank of cloud. A 
squall, driving a tempest of snow before it, struck the 
speeding vessel, and in the fierce whirl of the snowdrift the 
folk on shore lost sight of the Eurydice for some minutes. 
But as swiftly as it had come, the squall had passed. The 
sun shone brightly again, but on a troubled sea. And 



The '' Eurydice^ — a Reminiscence, 299 

where was the gallant ship, homeward bound, and all her 
gallant company? She had gone down, all sail set, all 
hands aboard. And the boats dashed out from the shore to 
the rescue ! But alas ! only two survivors out of the three 
hundred and fifty souls that manned the barque ever set 
foot on shore again ! And the news flashed over England 
that the Eurydice was " lost." For days and weeks after- 
wards there^ stood up out of the water, half-way between 
Shanklin and Luccombe Chine, one lonely spar, like a 
gravestone, and those who rowed over the wreck could see, 
down below them under the clear green waves, the shimmer 
of the white sails of the sunken war-boat. She was lying on 
her side, the fore and mizzen top-gallant masts gone, her 
top-gallant sails hanging, but with her main-mast in its place, 
and all the other sails set. The squall had struck her full, 
and she rolled over at once, the sea rising at one rush above 
the waists of the crew, and her yards lying on the water. 
Then, righting for an instant, she made an effort to recover 
herself But the weight of water that had already poured 
in between decks drove her under. The sea then leaped 
with another rush upon her, and in an awful s^yirl of waves 
the beautiful ship, with all her crew, went down. The 
Channel tide closed over the huge coffin, and except for 
the two men saved, and the corpses which floated ashore, 
there was nothing to tell of the sudden tragedy. 

And then back into the city and amongst its shipping. I 
have all the Britisher's attraction towards the haunts of the 
men that "go down to the sea in ships." Indeed, walking 
about among great wharves and docks, with the shipping of all 
nations loading and discharging cargo, and men of all nations 
hard at work about you, is in itself a liberal education. 

But it can nowhere be enjoyed in such perfection as in 
London. There, emphatically, is the world's market ; and 



300 Sinners and Saints. 

written large upon the pavement of her gigantic docks is the 
whole Romance of Trade. A single shed holds the products 
of all the Continents ; and what a book it would be that told 
us of the strange industries of foreign lands ! Who cut that 
ebony and that iron-wood in the Malayan forests ? and how 
came these palm-nuts here from the banks of the Niger? 
Mustard from India, and coffee-berries from Ceylon lie 
together to be crushed under one boot, and here at one 
step you can tread on the chili-pods of Jamaica and the 
pea-nuts of America. That rat that ran by was a thing 
from Morocco ; this squashed scorpion, perhaps, began life 
in Cyprus or in Bermuda. Queer little stowaways of insect 
life are here in abundance, the parasites of Egyptian lentils 
or of Indian corn. The mosquito natives of Bengal swamps 
are brought here, it may be, in teakwood from some drift on 
the Burman coast. All the world's produce is in convention 
together. Here stands a great pyramid of horned skulls, the 
owners of which once rampaged on Brazilian pampas, or 
the prairies of the Platte River, and hard by them lie piled 
a multitude of hides that might have fitted the owners of 
those skulls, had it not been that they once clothed the 
bodies of cattle that grazed out their lives in Australia. 
Juxtaposition of packages here means nothing It does not 
argue any previous affinities. This ship happens to be dis- 
charging Norwegian pine, in which the capercailzies have 
roosted, and for want of space the logs are being piled on 
to sacks of ginger from the West Indies. Next them there 
happens to-day to be cutch from India; to-morrow there 
may be gamboge from Siam, or palm oil from the Gold 
Coast. These men here are trundling in great casks of 
Spanish wine that have been to the Orient for their health ; 
but an hour ago they were wheeling away chests of Assam 
tea, and in another hour may be busy with logwood from 



Californiati Dia^nonds, 301 

the Honduras forests. One of them is all white on the 
shoulders with sacks of American wheat flour, but his hands 
are stained all the same with Bengal turmeric, and he is 
munching as he goes a cardamum from the Coromandel 
coast. What a book it would make — this World's Work ! 

And then back through this city of prodigious bustle, 
through fine streets with masses of solid buildings that stand 
upon a site which, a few years ago, was barren sea-sand, 
and some of it, too, actually sea-beach swept by the waves ! 

The frequency of diamonds in the windows is a point 
certain to catch the stranger's eye, but his interest somewhat 
diminishes when he finds that they are only " California 
diamonds." They are exquisite stones, however, and, to my 
thinking, more beautiful than coloured gems, ruby, sap- 
phire, or amethyst, that are more costly in price. But 
the real diamond can, nevertheless, be seen in perfection 
in San Francisco. Go to Andrews' " Diamond Palace," and 
take a glimpse of a jeweller's fairyland. The beautiful 
gems fairly fill the place with light, while the owner's artistic 
originality has devised many novel methods of showing off 
his favourite gem to best advantage. The roof and walls, 
for instance, are frescoed with female figures adorned on 
neck and arm, finger, ear, and waist, with triumphs of the 
lapidary's art. 

There is something very fascinating to the fancy in gems, 
for the one secret that Nature still jealously guards from 
man is the composition of those exquisite crystals which we 
call "precious stones," We can imitate, and do imitate, 
some of them with astonishing exactness, but after all is 
done there still remains something lacking in the artificial 
stone. Wise men may elaborate a prosaic chemistry, pro- 
ducing crystals which they declare to be the fac-similes of 
Nature's delightful gems ; but the world will not accept the 



302 Sinners and Saints. 

ruddy residue of a crucible full of oxides as rubies, or the 
shining fragments of calcined bisulphides as emeralds. No 
crucible yet constructed can hold a native sapphire, and all 
the alchemy of man directed to this point has failed to 
extort from carbon the secret of its diamond— the little 
crystal that earth with all her chemistry has made so few of, 
since first heat and water, Nature's gem-smiths, joined their 
forces to produce the glittering stones. They placed under 
requisition every kingdom of created things, and in a 
laboratory in mid-earth set in joint motion all the powers 
that move the volcano and the earthquake, that re-fashion 
the world's form and substance, that govern all the stately 
procession of natural phenomena. Yet with all this Titanic 
labour, this monstrous co-operation of forces, Nature formed 
only here and there a diamond, and here and there a ruby. 
Masses of quartz, crystals of every exquisite tint, ame- 
thystine and blue, as beautiful, perhaps, in delicacy of 
hue as the gems themselves, were sown among the rocks 
and scattered along the sands, but only to tell us how near 
Nature came to making her jewels common, and how— just 
when the one last touch was needed — she withheld her hand, 
so that man should confess that the supreme triumphs of 
her art were indeed " precious " ! 



303 



CHAPTER XXIV. 

Gigantic America — Of the treatment of strangers — The vvild-iife world 
— Railway Companies' food-frauds — California Felix — Prairie-dog 
history — The exasperation of wealth — Blessed with good oil — The 
meek lettuce and judicious onion — Salads and Salads — The perils 
of promiscuous grazing. 

I HAD looked forward to my journey from San Francisco 
to St. Louis with great anticipations, and, though I had no 
leisure to "stop off " on the tour, I was not disappointed. 
Six continuous days and nights of railway travelling carried 
me through such prodigious widths of land, that the mere 
fact of traversing so much space had fascinations. And the 
variations of scene are very striking — the corn and grape 
lands of Southern California, that gradually waste away into 
a hideous cactus desert, and then sink into a furnace-valley, 
several hundred feet below the level of the sea; the wild 
pastures of Texas, that seem endless, until they end in 
swamped woodlands ; the terrific wildernesses of Arkansas, 
that gradually soften down into the beautiful fertility of 
Missouri. It was a delightful journey, and taught me in 
one week's panorama more than a British Museum full of 
books could have done. 

Visitors to America do not often make the journey. 
They are beguiled off by way of Santa Fe and Kansas City. 
I confess that I should myself have been very glad to have 
visited Santa Fe, and some day or other I intend to pitch 



304 Sinners and Saints. 

mj tent for a while in San Antonio. But if I had to give 
advice to a traveller, I would say : — 

" Take the Southern Pacific to El Paso, and the Texan 
Pacific on to St. Louis, and you will get such an idea of the 
spaciousness of America as no other trip can give you." You 
will see prodigious tracts of country that are still in abo- 
riginal savagery and you will travel through whole nations of 
hybrid people — Mexicans and mulattoes, graduated com- 
mixtures of Red Indian, Spaniard, and Negro — that some 
day or another must assume a very considerable political 
importance in the Union. 

Nothing would do Americans more good than a tour 
through Upper India. Nothing could do European visitors 
to America more good than the journey from San Francisco 
to St. Louis by the Southern-and-Texas route. The Gan- 
getic Valley, the Western Ghats, the Himalayas, are all 
experiences that would ameliorate, improve, and impress 
the American. The Arizona cactus-plains, the Texan flower- 
prairies, the Arkansas swamps, give the traveller from 
Europe a more truthful estimate of America, as a whole, by 
their vastness, their untamed barbarism, their contrast with 
the civilized and domesticated States, than years of travel 
on the beaten tracks from city to city. 

And here just a word or two to those American gentlemen 
to whom it falls to amuse or edify the sight-seeing foreigner. 
Do not be disappointed if he shows little enthusiasm for your 
factories, and mills, and populous streets. Remember that 
these are just what he is trying to escape from. The chances 
are, that he would much rather see a prairie-dog city, than 
the Omaha smelting-works ; an Indian lodge than Pittsburg ; 
one wild bison than all the cattle of Chicago ; a rattlesnake 
at home than all the legislature of New York in Albany as- 
sembled. He prefers canons to streets, mountain streams 



The Stranger within your Gates, 305 

to canals ; and when he crosses the river, it is the river more 
than the bridge that interests him. Of course it is well for 
him to stay in your gigantic hotels, go down into your gigan- 
tic silver-mines, travel on your gigantic river-steamers, and 
be introduced to your gigantic millionaires. These are all 
American, and it is good for him, and seemly, that he should 
add them to his personal experiences. So too, he should eat 
terrapin and planked shad, clam-chowder, canvas -back ducks, 
and soft-shelled crabs. For these are also American. But the 
odds are he may go mad and bite thee fatally, if thou wakest 
him up at un-Christian hours to go and see a woollen fac- 
tory, simply because thou art proud of it— or settest him down 
to breakfast before perpetual beefsteak, merely because he 
is familiar with that food. The intelligent traveller, being at 
Rome, wishes to be as much a Roman as possible. He would 
be as aboriginal as the aborigines. And it is a mistake to go 
on thrusting things upon him solely on the ground that he is 
already weary of them. As I write, I remember many hours 
of bitter anguish which I have endured — / who am familiar 
with Swansea, who have stayed in Liverpool, who live in 
London — in loitering round smelting works and factories, and 
places of business, trying to seem interested, and pretending 
to store my memory with statistics. Sometimes it would be 
almost on my tongue to say, " And now, sir, having shown off 
your possessions in order to gratify your own pride in them, 
suppose you show me something for my gratification." I 
never did, of course, but I groaned in the spirit, at my 
precious hours being wasted, and at the hospitality which so 
easily forgot itself in ostentatious display. I have perhaps 
said more than I meant to have done. But all I mean is 
this, that when a sojourner is at your mercy, throw him 
unreservedly upon his own resources for such time as you are 
bus}', and deny yourself unreservedly for /^/j- amusement when 

X 



3o6 Sinners and Saints, 

you are at leisure. But do not spoil all his day, and half 
your own, by trying to work your usual business habits 
into his holiday, and take advantage of his foreign helpless- 
ness to show him what an important person (when at 
home) you are yourself. Do not, for instance, take him 
after breakfast to your office, and there settling to your 
work with your clerks, ask him to " amuse himself " with 
the morning papers — for three hours; and then, after a 
hurried luncheon at your usual restaurant, take him back to 
the office for a few minutes — another hour ; and then, hav- 
ing carefully impressed upon him that you are taking a 
half-holiday solely upon his account, and in spite of all the 
overwhelming business that pours in uponyou,donottakehim 
for a drive in the Mall — in order to show off your new horses 
to your own acquaintances; and after calling at a few 
shops (during which time your friend stays in the trap and 
holds the reins), do not, oh do not, take him back to your 
house to a solitary dinner " quite in the English style." No, 
sir; this is not the way to entertain the wayfarer in such aland 
of wonders as this ; and you ought not therefore to feel sur- 
prise when your guest, wearied of your mistaken hospitality, 
and wearied of your perpetual suggestions of your own self- 
sacrifice on his behalf, suddenly determines not to be a 
burden upon you any longer, and escapes the same evening 
to the most distant hotel in the town. Nor when you read 
this ought you to feel angry. You did him a great wrong 
in wasting a whole day out of his miserable three, and 
exasperated him by telling his friends afterwards what a 
"good time" he had with you. These few words are his 
retaliation — not written either in the vindictive spirit of 
reprisal, but as advice to you for the future and in the interests 
of strangers who may follow him within your gates. 

From San Francisco to l.athrop, back on the route we 



The Wild-life wo7dd. 307 

came by, to Oakland, and over the brown waters of the 
arrogant Sacramento — swelling out as if it would imitate 
the ocean, and treating the Pacific as if it were merely "a 
neighbour," — and out into thousands and thousands of 
acres of corn, stubble, and mown hay-fields, the desolation 
worked by the reaper-armies of peace-time with their fragrant 
plunder lying in heaps all ready for the carts ; and the camp- 
followers — the squirrels, and the rats, and the finches — all 
busy gleaning in the emptied fields, with owls sitting watch- 
ful on the fences, and vigilant buzzards sailing overhead. 
What an odd life this is, of the squirrels and the buzzards, 
the mice, and the owls ! They used to watch each other 
in these fields, just in the very same way, ages before the 
white men came. The colonization of the Continent means 
to the squirrels and mice merely a change in their food, 
to the hawks and the owls merely a slight change in the 
flavour of the squirrels and mice ! So, too, when the 
Mississippi suddenly swelled up in flood the other day, and 
overflowed three States, it lengthened conveniently the 
usual water-ways of the frogs, and gave the turtles a more 
comfortable amplitude of marsh. Hundreds of negroes 
narrowly escaped drowning, it is true ; but what an awful 
destruction there was of smaller animal life ! Scores of 
hamlets were doubtless destroyed, but what myriads of 
insect homes were ruined ! It does one good, I think, 
sometimes to remember the real aborigines of our earth, 
the worlds that had their laws before ours, those conser- 
vative antiquities with a civilization that was perfect before 
man was created, and which neither the catastrophes of 
nature nor the triumphs of science have power to abrogate. 
Oak trees dot the rolling hills, and now and again we 
come to houses with gardens and groves of eucalyptus, but 
for hours we travel through one continuous corn-field, a 

X 2 



3o8 Sinners and Saints. 

veritable Prairie of Wheat, astounding in extent and in 
significance. And then we come upon the backwaters of 
the San Joacquin, and the flooded levels of meadow, with 
their beautiful oak groves, and herds of cattle and horses 
grazing on the lush grass that grows between the beds of 
green tuilla reeds. It is a lovely reach of country this, and 
some of the water views are perfectly enchanting. But why 
should the company carefully board up its bridges so that 
travellers shall not enjoy the scenes up and down the rivers 
which they cross ? It seems to me a pity to do so, seeing 
that it is really quite unnecessary. As it was, we saw just 
enough of beauty to make us regret the boards. Then, 
after the flooded lands, we enter the vast corn-fields again, 
and so arrive at Lathrop. 

Here we dined, and well, the service also being excellent, 
for half a dollar. Could not the Union Pacific take a 
lesson from the Southern Pacific, and instead of giving 
travellers offal at a dollar a head at Green River and 
other eating-houses, give them good food of the Lathrop 
kind for fifty cents ? As I have said before, the wretched 
eating-houses on the Union Pacific are maintained, con- 
fessedly, for the benefit of the eating-houses, and the 
encouragement of local colonization ; but it is surely unfair 
on the " transient " to make him contribute, by hunger, 
indigestion, and ill-temper, to the perpetration of an imposi- 
tion. On the Southern and the Texas Pacific there are 
first-rate eating-places, some at fifty cents, some at seventy- 
five, and, as we approach an older civilization, others at a 
dollar. But no one can grudge a dollar for a good meal 
in a comfortable room with civil attendance ; while on the 
Union Pacific there is much to make the passenger dis- 
satisfied, besides the nature of the food, for it is often 
served by ill-mannered waiters in cheerless rooms. A 



California Felix. 309 

very little industry, or still less enterprise, might make other 
eating-places like Humboldt. 

It was at Lathrop that some Californians of a very rough 
type wished to invade our sleeping-car. They wanted to 
know the " racket," didn't " care if they had to pay fifty 
dollars," had " taken a fancy " to it, &c., &c. ; but the con- 
ductor, with considerable tact, managed to persuade them 
to abandon their design of travelling like gentlemen, and 
so they got into another car, where they played cards for 
drinks, fired revolvers out of the window at squirrels 
between the deals, and got up a quarrel over it at the 
end of every hand. 

California Felix ! Aye, happy indeed in its natural re- 
sources. For we are again whirling along through prairies 
of corn-land, a monotony of fertility that becomes almost 
as serious as the grassy levels of the Platte, the sage- 
brush of Utah, or the gravelled sands of Nevada. And 
so to Modesta, a queer, wide-streeted, gum-treed place, not 
the least like " America," but a something between Madeira 
and Port Elizabeth. It has not 2000 people in it alto- 
gether, yet walking across the dusty square is a lady 
in the modes of Paris, and a man in a stove-pipe hat ! 
Another stretch of farm-lands brings us to Merced, and 
the county of tfiat name, a miracle of fertility even among 
such perpetual marvels of richness. If I were to say what 
the average of grain per acre is, English farmers might 
go mad, but if the printer will put it into some very 
small type I will whisper it to you that the men of 
IsiQXCQd grumble at seventy bushels per acre. I should like 
to own Merced, I confess. I am a person of moderate 
desires. A httle contents me. And it is only a mere 
scrap, after all, of this bewildering California. On the 
counter at the hotel at Merced are fir-cones from the 



3IO Sinner's and Saints, 

Big Trees and fossil fragments and wondrous minerals 
from Yosemite, and odds and ends of Spanish ornaments. 
The whole place has a Spanish air about it. This used 
to be the staging-point for travellers to the Valley of 
Wonders, but times have changed, and with them the 
stage- routC; so Merced is left on one side by the tourist 
stream. Leaving it ourselves, we traverse patches of wild 
sunflower, and then find ourselves out on wide levels of 
uncultivated land, waiting for the San Joacquin (pronounced, 
by the way, Sanwa-Keen) canal, to bring irrigation to them. 
How the Mormons would envy the Californians if they 
were their neighbours, and the contrast is indeed pathetic, 
between the alkaline wastes of Utah and the fat glebes 
of Merced ! 

At present, however, a nation of little owls possesses 
the uncultivated acres, and ground squirrels hold the 
land from them on fief, paying, no doubt, in their 
vassalage a feudal tribute of their plump, well-nourished 
bodies. To right and left lies spread out an immense 
prairie-dog settlement, deserted now, however ; and beyond 
it, on either side, a belt of pretty timbered land stretches 
to the coast range, which we see far away on the right, 
and to the foot-hills — the " Sewaliks " of the Sierra Nevada, 
— which rise up, capped and streaked with snow, on the 
left. 

Wise men read history for us backwards from the records 
left by ruins. Why not do the same here with this vast 
City of the Prairie-Dogs that continues to right and left 
of us, miles after miles? Once upon a time, then, 
there was a powerful nation of prairie-dogs in this place, 
and they becaine, in process of years, debauched by luxury, 
and weakened by pride. So they placed the government 
in the hands of the owls, whom they invited to come and 



Prairie-dog Histoiy. 3 1 1 

live with them, and gave over the protection of the country 
to the rattlesnakes, whom they maintained as janissaries. 
But the owls and the rattlesnakes, finding all the power in 
their own hands, and seeing that the prairie-dogs had grown 
idle and fat and careless, conspired together to overthrow 
their masters. Now there lived near them, but in sub- 
jection to the prairie-dogs, a race of ground-squirrels, a 
hard-working, thick-skinned, bushy-tailed folk ; and the 
owls and the rattlesnakes made overtures to the ground- 
squirrels, and one morning, when the prairie-dogs were out 
feeding and gambolling in the meadows, the conspirators 
rushed to arms, and while the rattlesnakes and the ground- 
squirrels, their accomplices, seized possession of the vacated 
city, the owls attacked the prairie-dogs with their beaks and 
wings. And the end of it was disaster, utter and terrible; 
and the prairie-dogs fled across the plains into the wood- 
land for shelter, but did not stay there, but passed on, in 
one desolating exodus, to the foot-hills beyond the wood- 
land. And then the owls and the rattlesnakes and the 
ground-squirrels divided the deserted city among them. 
And to this day the ground-squirrels pay a tribute of their 
young to the owls and the rattlesnakes, as the price of 
possession and of their protection. But they are always 
afraid that the prairie-dogs may come back again some 
day (as the Mormons are going back to Jackson County, 
Missouri), to claim their old homesteads; and so, when- 
ever the ground-squirrels go out to feed and gambol in 
the meadows, the rattlesnakes remain at the bottom of 
the holes, and the owls sit on sentry duty at the top. 
Isn't that as good as any other conjectural history ? 

And then Madera, with its great canal all rafted over 
with floating timber, and more indications, in the eating- 
house, of the neighbourhood of the Big Trees and Yosemite. 



Sinners and Saints, 



For this is the point of departure now in vogue, the distance 
being only seventy miles, and the roads good. But of the 
trip to Clark's, and thence on to " Yohamite " and to Fresno 
Grove— hereafter. Meanwhile, grateful for the good meal 
at Madera, we are again smoking the meditative pipe, and 
looking out upon Owl-land, with the birds all duly perched 
at their posts, and their bushy-tailed companions enjoying 
life immensely in family parties among the short grass. 
Herds of cattle are seen here and there, and wonderful 
their condition, too \ and thus, through flat pastures all 
pimpled over with old, fallen-in, '^ dog-houses," we reach 
Fresno. This monotony of fertility is beginning to exas- 
perate me. It is a trait of my personal character, this objec- 
tion to monotonous prosperity. I like to see streaks of lean. 
Thus I begin to think of Vanderbilts as of men who have 
done me an injury ; and unless Jay Gould recovers his ground 
with me, by conferring a share upon me, I shall feel called 
upon to take personal exception to his great wealth. And 
now comes Fresno, a welcome stretch of land that requires 
irrigation to be fruitful, a land that only gives her favours 
to earnest wooers, and does not, like the rest of California, 
smile on every vagabond admirer. Where the ground is 
not cultivated, it forms fine parade-ground for the owls, and 
rare pleasaunces for the squirrels. But what a nymph this 
same water is ! Look at this patch of greensward all set in a 
bezel of bright foliage and bright with wild flowers ! In 
mythology there is a goddess under whose feet the earth 
breaks into blossoms and leaves. I forget her name. But 
it should have been Hydore. And now, as the evening 
gathers round, we see the outlines of the Sierras, away on 
the left, blurring into twilight tints of blue and grey-— and 
then to bed. 

California is blest in the olive. It grows to perfection, 



Blessed with good Oil. 3 1 3 

and the result is that the California is no stranger to the 
priceless luxury of good oil, and can enjoy, at little cost, the 
delights of a good salad. How often, in rural England, with 
acres of salad material growing fresh and crisp all round me, 
have I groaned at the impossibility of a salad, by reason 
of the atrocious character of the local grocer's oil ! But in 
California all the oil is good, and the vegetable ingredients 
of the fascinating bowl are superb. But in America there is 
a fatal determination towards mayonnaise, and every com- 
mon waiter considers himself capable of mixing one. So 
that even in California your hopes are sometimes blighted, 
and your good humour turned to gall, by fools rushing in 
where even angels should have to pass an examination 
before admission. A simpler salad, however, is better than 
any mayonnaise, and once the proportions are mastered, 
a child may be entrusted with the mixture. 

The lettuce, by long familiarity, has come to be considered 
the true basis of all salad, and in its generous expanse of 
faintly flavoured leaf, so cool and juicy and crisp when 
brought in fresh from the garden, it has certainly some claims 
to the proud position. But a multitude of salads can be 
made without any lettuce at all, and it is doubtful whether 
either Grieece or Rome used it as an ingredient of the bowl 
in which the austere endive and pungent onion always found 
a place. Now-a-days however, lettuce is a deserving favourite. 
It has no sympathies or antipathies, and no flavour strong 
enough to arouse enthusiasm or aversion. It is not aggressive 
or self-assertive, but, like those amiable people with whom 
no one ever quarrels, is always ready to be of service, no 
matter what company may be thrust upon it, or what treat- 
ment it has to undergo. Opinions of its own it has none, 
so it easily adopts those of others, and takes upon itself — 
and so distributes over the whole— any properties of taste or 



314 Sinners and Sa ints . 

smell that may be communicated to it by its neighbours. 
An onion might be rubbed with lettuce for an indefinite 
period and betray no alteration in its original nature, but 
the lettuce if only touched with onion becomes at once a 
modified onion itself, and no ablution will remove from it 
the suspicion of the contact. The gentle leaf is therefore 
often ill-used, but, after all, even this, the meekest of vege- 
tables, will turn upon the oppressor, and if not eaten young 
and fresh, or if slaughtered with a steel blade, will convert 
the salad that should have been short and sharp in the 
mouth into a basin of limp rags, that cling together in 
sodden lumps, and when swallowed conduce to melancholy 
and repentance. The antithesis of the lettuce is the onion. 
Both are equally essential to the perfect salad, but for most 
opposite reasons. The lettuce must be there to give sub- 
stance to the whole, to retain the oil and salt and vinegar, to 
borrow fragrance and to look green and crisp. It underlies 
everything else, and acts as conductor to all, like conscious- 
ness in the human mind. It is the bulk of the salad so far 
as appearances go, and yet it alone could be turned out 
without affecting the flavour of the dish. It is only the 
canvas upon which the artist paints. 

How different is the onion ! It adds nothing to the 
amount, and contributes nothing to the sight, yet it per- 
meates the whole ; not, however, as an actual presence, but 
rather as a reflection, a shadow, or a suspicion. Like the 
sunset-red, it tinges everything it falls upon, and everywhere 
reveals new beauties. It is the master-mind in the mixed 
assembly, allowing each voice to be heard, but guiding the 
many utterances to one symmetrical result. It keeps a 
strong restraint upon itself, helping out, with a judicious 
hint only, those who need it, and never interfering with 
neighbours that can assert their own individuality. I 



Salads and Salads. 3 1 5 

speak, of course, of the onion as it appears in the civilized 
salad, and not the outrageous vegetable that the Prophet 
condemned and Italy cannot do without. Some pretend to 
have a prejudice against the onion, but as an American 
humourist — Dudley Warner — says, " There is rather a 
cowardice in regard to it. I doubt not all men and 
women love the onion, but few confess it." 

In simplicity lies perfection. The endive and beetroot, 
fresh bean, and potato, radish and mustard and cress, 
asparagus and celery, cabbage-hearts and parsley, tomato 
and cucumber, green peppers and capers, and all the other 
ingredients that in this salad or in that find a place are, no 
doubt, well enough in their way ; but the greatest men of 
modern times have agreed in saying that, given three vege- 
tables and a master-mind, a perfect salad may be the result. 
But for the making there requires to be present a miser to 
dole out the vinegar, a spendthrift to sluice on the oil, a 
sage to apportion the salt, and a maniac to stir. The 
household that can produce these four, and has at 
command a firm, stout-hearted lettuce, three delicate spring 
onions, and a handful of cress, need ask help from none and 
envy none; for in the consumption of the salad thus 
ambrosially resulting, all earth's cares may be for the while 
forgotten, and the consumer snap his fingers at the stocks, 
whether they go up or down. There is no need to go beyond 
these frugal ingredients. In Europe it is true men range 
hazardously far afield for their green meat. They tell us, 
for instance, of the fearful joy to be snatched from nettle- 
tops, but it is not many who care thus to rob the hairy 
caterpillar of his natural food ; nor in eating the hawthorn 
buds, where the sparrows have been before us, is there such 
prospect of satisfaction as to make us hurry to the hedges. 
The dandelion, too, we are told, is a wholesome herb, and 



3 1 6 Sinners and Saints, 

so is wild sorrel ; but who among us can find the time to 
go wandering about the country grazing with the cattle, and 
playing Nebuchadnezzar among the green stuff? In the 
Orient the native is never at a loss for salad, for he grabs the 
weeds at a venture, and devours them complacently, relying 
upon " fate " to work them all up to a good end ; and the 
Chinaman, so long as he can only boil it first, turns every- 
thing that grows into a vegetable for the table. 

But it would not be safe to send a public of higher 
organization into the highways and ditches ; for a rabid 
longing for vegetable food, unballasted by botanical know- 
ledge, might conduce to the consumption of many unwhole- 
some plants, with their concomitant insect evils. Dreadful 
stories are told of the results arising from the careless eating 
of unwashed watercress ; and in country places the horrors 
that are said to attend the swallowing of certain herbs with- 
out a previous removal of the things that inhabit them are 
sufficient to deter the most ravenously inclined from taking 
a miscellaneous meal off the roadside, and from promiscuous 
grazing in hedge-rows. 



317 



CHAPTER XXV. 

The Carlyle of vegetables— The moral in blight— Bee-farms— The city 
of Angels— Of squashes— Curious Vegetation— The incompatibility 
of camels and Americans- Are rabbits "seals"?— All wilderness 
and no weather— An "infinite torment of flies." 

The cactus is the Carlyle of vegetation. Here, in 
Southern California, it assumes many of its most uncouth 
and affected attitudes, puts on all its prickles and its angles, 
and its blossoms of rare splendour. Those who are better 
informed than myself assure me that the cactus is a vege- 
table. I take their word for it. Indeed, the cactus itself 
may have said so to them. There is nothing a cactus might 
not do. But it surely stands among plants somewhere 
where bats do among animals, and the apteryx among birds. 
Look for instance at this tract of cactus which we cross 
before Caliente. There are chair-legs and footstools, 
pokers, brooms, and telegraph-poles ; but can you honestly 
call them plants ? 

But stay a moment. Can you not call them plants ? Look ! 
See those superb blossoms of crimson upon that footstool of 
thorns, those golden stars upon the telegraph-pole yonder, 
those beautiful flowers of rosy pink upon that besom-head. 
Yes, they are plants, and worthy of all admiration, for they 
have the genius of a true originality, and the sudden 
splendour of the flowers they put forth are made all the 
more admirable by the surprise of them and the eccentricity. 



3 1 8 Sinners and Saints, 

And with them grows the yucca, that wonderful plant that 
sends up from its rosette of bayonets — they call it the 
"Spanish bayonet" in the West — a green shaft, six feet 
high, and all hung with white waxen bells. I got out of 
the train at one of its stoppages, and cut a couple of heads 
of this wonderland plant, and found the blossoms on each 
numbered between 400 and 406. And there was a certain 
moral discipline in it too. For we found these exquisite flower- 
hung shafts were smothered in " blight," those detestable, 
green, sticky aphides, that sometimes make rose-buds so 
dreadful, and are the enemy of all hothouses. Looking out 
at the yuccas as we passed, those splendid coronals of 
waxen blossoms — pure enough for cathedral chancels — it 
seemed asif they were things of a perfect and unsullied beauty. 
My arrival with them was hailed with cries of admiration, 
and for the first moment enthusiasm was supreme. But the 
next, alas for impure beauty! the swarms of clinging 
parasites were detected. Hands that had been stretched 
out to hold such things of grace, shrank from even touch- 
ing them, known to be polluted, and so, at last, with honours 
that were more than half condescension, the yucca-spikes 
were put out on the platform, to be admired from a distance. 
Passing through the cactus land we saw numbers of tiny- 
rabbits — the " cotton tails," as distinguished from the "mule- 
ears " or jack-rabbits — dodging about the stems and grass ; 
but in about an hour the grotesque vegetable began to sober 
down into a botanical conglomerate that defies analysis, 
and gives the little rabbits a denser covert. The general 
result of this change in the botany was as Asiatic, as Indian 
as it could be, but why^ it were difficult to say, unless it 
was the prevalence of the babool-hke "muskeet," and 
the beautiful but murderous dhatura — the " thorn-apple " 
of Europe. Yet there was sage-brush enough to make 



Bee-farms, 3 1 9 



Asia impossible, while the variations of the botany were 
too sudden for any generalizations of character. And so 
on, past an oil-mill on the left — petroleum bubbling out of 
the hillock — and a great farm, " Newhall's," on the right ; 
past Andrews and up the hill to the San Fernando tunnel, 
7000 feet in length, and then down the hill again into San 
Fernando. Has any one ever "stopped off" at San 
Fernando and spent any time with the monks at their 
picturesque old mission, smothered in orangeries, and 
dozed away the summer hours amongst them, watching 
the peaches ripen and the bees gathering honey, and opening 
bottles of mellow California wine to help along the intervals 
between drowsy mass and merry meal-times ? I think when 
my sins weigh too heavily on me to let me live among men, 
I will retire to San Fernando, to the bee-keeping, orange- 
growing fathers, ask them to receive my bones, and start a 
beehive and an orange-tree of my own. It does not seem 
to me, looking forward to it, a very arduous life, and I 
might then, at last, overtake that seldom-captured will-o'- 
the-wisp, fleet-footed Leisure. 

The bees, by the way, are kept on a "ranch," whole herds 
and herds of bees, all hived together in long rows of hives, 
hundreds to the acre. They fly afield to feed themselves, 
and come home with their honey tq make the monks rich. 
I am not sure that these fathers have done all they might 
for the country they settled in, and yet who is not grate- 
ful to the brethren for the picturesqueness of comparative 
antiquity? Their very idleness is a charm, and their quiet, 
comfortable life, half in cloisters, half in orange groves, is 
a delight and a refreshment in modern America. 

But the loveliness of their country, and the wonder of its 
possibilities ! Can any one be surprised that we are 
approaching the city oi Los Angeles ? A briglit river comes 



320 Sinners and Saints, 

tumbling along under cliffs all hung with flowering creepers, 
and between banks that are beautiful with ferns and flowers, 
and the land widens out into cornfield and meadow; and away 
to right and left, lying under the hills and overflowing into all 
the valleys, are the vineyards, and orchards, and orangeries 
that make the City of Angels worthy of a king's envy and 
a people's pride. As yet, of course, it is the day of small 
things, as compared with what will be when water is every- 
where ; but even now Los Angeles is a place for the artist to 
stay in and the tourist to visit. There is a great deal to 
remind you of the East, in this valley of dark-skinned men, 
and in the " bazaars," with their long ropes of chilis dangling 
on the door-posts, the fruit piled up in baskets on the mules, 
the brown bare-legged children under hats with wide ragged 
brims, there are all the familiar features of Southern Europe, 
hot, strong-smelling, and picturesque. But Los Angeles 
shares with the rest of California the disadvantage under 
which all climates of great forcing power and rudimentary 
science must lie. for its fruits, though exquisite to look upon, 
often prodigious in size, and always incredible in quantity, 
fail, as a rule, dismally in flavour. The figs are very large, 
both green and black, but they seem to have ripened in 
a perpetual rainstorm ; the oranges look perfection, and are 
as bad as any I have had in America ; the peaches are 
splendid in their appearance, for their coarse barbaric 
skins are painted with deep yellow and red, but they ought 
not to be called " peaches " at all. They would taste just 
as well by any other name, and the traveller who knows 
the peaches of Europe, or the peaches of Persia, would not 
then be disappointed. 

So away from Los Angeles, with its groups of idle, 
brown-faced men, in their flap-brimmed Mexican hats, 
leaning against the posts smoking thin cigars, and its 



Of Squashes. 321 



groups of listless, dark- eyed women, with bright kerchiefs 
round their heads or necks, sitting on the doorsteps ; away- 
through valleys of corn, broken up by orangeries and vine- 
yards, where the river flows through a tangle of willow 
and elder and muskeet ; past the San Gabriel Mission, 
overtaken, poor idle old fragment of the past, by the rail- 
road civilization of the present, and already isolated in 
its sleepiness and antiquity from the busier, younger world 
about it ; on through a scene of perpetual fertility, orange 
groves and lemon, fields of vegetables and corn, with 
pomegranates all aglow with scarlet flowers, and eucalyptus- 
trees in their ragged foliage of blue and brown. 

The squash grows here to a monstrous size. " I have seen 
them, sir," said a passenger, "weighing as much as your- 
self." The impertinence of it ! Think of a squash 
venturing to turn the scale against me. Perhaps it will 
pretend that it has as good a seat on a horse ? Or will 
it play me a single-wicket match at cricket ? I should 
not have minded so much if it had been a water-melon, 
or even a " simlin," or some o'ther refined variety of 
the family. But that a squash, the ' poor relation ' of 

the pumpkin, should . But enough. Let us be 

generous, even to squashes. 

Some one ought to write the psychology of the squash. 
There is a very large human family of the same name 
and character. If you ask what the bulky, tasteless thing 
is good for, people always say, " Oh, for a pie ! " Now 
that is the only form in which I have tasted it. And I 
can say, from personal experience, therefore, that it is 
not good for that. It never hurts anybody, or speaks ill 
of any one - an inoffensive, tedious, stupid person, too 
commonplace to be either liked or disliked. Economical 
parents say squashes are " very good for children," espe- 

Y 



322 Sinners and Saints, 

cially in pies. They may be. But they are not conducive 
to the formation of character. 

Some one, too, ought to visit these old Franciscan 
missions in Southern California — some one who could write 
about them, and sketch them. They are very delightful ; 
the more delightful, perhaps, because they are in the 
United States, in the same continent as " live " towns, as 
Chicago, and Omaha, and Leadville, and Tombstone. 
Scattered about among the roiling grassland are hollows 
filled with orchards, in which old settlements and new are 
fairly embowered, while the missions themselves are sin- 
gularly picturesque ; and San Gabriel's Church, they say, 
has a pretty peal of bells, which the monks carried over- 
land from Mexico in the old Spaniard days, and which still 
chime for vespers as sweetly as ever. What a wonder it must 
have been to the wandering Indians to hear that most 
beautiful of all melodies, the chime of bells, ascending 
with the evening mists from under the feet of the hills ! 
No wonder they had campanile legends, these poor poets 
of the river and prairie, and still speak of Valleys of En- 
chantment whence music may be heard at nightfall ! 

Past Savanna and Monte, with its swine droves, and its 
settlement of men who live on " hog and hominy," past 
Puente, and Spadra, and Pomona, into Colton, where we 
dine, and well, for half a dollar, enjoying for- dessert a 
chat with a very pretty girl. She tells us of the beauties 
of San Bernardino, and I could easily credit even more 
than she says. For San Bernardino was settled by 
Mormons some fifty years ago, and has all the charms 
of Salt Lake City, with those of natural fertility and a 
profusion of natural vegetaton added. But I can say 
nothing of San Bernardino, for the train does not enter it. 
And then, reinforced by another engine — a dumpy engine- 



Curious Vegetation, 323 

of-all-work sort of " help " — clambers up the San Gorgonio 
pass. All along the road I notice a yellow thread-like 
epiphyte, or air-plant, tangling itself round the muskeet- 
trees, and killing them. They call it the " mistletoe " here ; 
but it is the same curious plant that strangles the orange 
trees in Indian gardens, and the jujubes in the jungles, 
that cobwebs the aloe hedges, and hangs its pretty little 
white bells of flower all over the undergrowth. On the 
bare, sandy ground a wild gourd, with yellow flowers and 
sharp-pointed spear-head leaves, throws out long strands, 
that creep flat upon the ground with a curious snake- 
like appearance. Clumps of wild oleander find a frugal 
subsistence, and here and there an elder or a walnut 
manages to thrive. But the profuse fertility of California 
is fast disappearing. And so to Gorgonio, at the top of 
the pass ; and then we begin to go down, down, down, 
till we are not surprised to hear that we are far below 
the level of the sea. The cactus has once more reasserted 
itself, and to right and left are " forests " of this grotesque 
candelabra-like vegetable, with stiff" arms, covered apparently 
with some woolly sort of fluff; The soil beneath them is a 
desperate-looking desert-sand, and here and there are bare 
levels of white glistening sterility. But water works such 
wonders that there is no saying what may happen. At 
present, however, it is pure, unadulterated desert — wilder- 
ness enough to delight a camel, were it not for the quantity 
of stones which strew the waste, and which would make 
it an abomination to that fastidious beast. Camels were 
once imported into the country, but the experiment failed 
— and no wonder. Imagine the modern American trying 
to drive a camel ! The Mexican might do it, but I doubt 
if any other race in all America could be found with sufficient 
contempt for time, sufficient patience in idleness, sufficient 

Y 2 



324 Sinners and Saints. 

camelishiess in fact, to " personally conduct " a camel train. 
There is a tradition, by the way, that somewhere in 
Arizona, wild camels, the descendants of the discarded brutes, 
are to be met with to this day, enjoying a life without 
occupations. 

At present the most formidable animal in possession of 
these cactus plains is the rabbit. But such a licence of 
ears as the creature has taken ! It must be developing 
them as weapons of offence : the future ^' horned rabbit." 
They call these long-eared animals " mules," and deny that 
you can make a rabbit-pie of them. This seems to me 
hardly fair on the rabbit. But in England the small rodent 
suffers under even more pointed injustice. 

A certain railway porter, it is said, was once sorely 
puzzled by a tortoise which the owner wished to send by 
train. The official was nonplussed by the inquiry as to which 
head of the tariff the creature should be considered to fall 
under; but, at last, deciding that it was neither '^ a dog" 
nor " a parrot " (the broad zoological classification in use 
on British railways) pronounced the tortoise to be " an in- 
sect," and therefore not Hable to charge. This profound 
decision was prefaced by a brief enumeration of the animals 
which the railway company call " dogs." " Cats is dogs, 
and rabbits is dogs, and so is guinea-pigs/' said the porter, 
" but squirrels in cages is parrots ! " 

But please note particularly the porter's confusion of iden- 
tity with regard to the rabbit. This excellent rodent is 
emphatically called ^^ a dog." But the rabbit knows much 
better than to mistake itself for a dog. It might as well 
think itself a poacher. 

Meanwhile, other attempts have been made to confuse it 
as to its own individuality ; and if the rabbit eventually 
gives itself up as a hopeless conundrum, it is not more than 



Are Rabbits Seals f 325 

might be expected. Its fur is now called " seal-skin " in the 
cheap goods market; the fluke has attacked it as if it were 
a sheep ; while in recent English elections, when the Ground 
Game Bill was to the front, it was a very important factor. All 
the same, everybody goes on shooting it just as if it were a 
mere rabbit. This, I would contend, is hardly fair ; for if its 
skin is really sealskin, the rabbit must, of necessity, be a seal, 
and, as such, ought to be harpooned from a boat, and not 
shot at with double-barrelled guns. It is absurd to talk of 
going out " sealing " in gaiters, with a terrier, for the pur- 
suit of the seal is a marine operation, and concerned with ships 
and icebergs and whaling line. K sportsman, therefore, who 
goes out in quest of this valuable pelt should, in common 
regard for the proprieties, affect Arctic apparel; and, instead 
of ranging with his gun, should station himself with a 
harpoon over the " seal's " blow-hole, and, when it comes 
up to breathe, take his chance of striking it, not forgetting 
to have some water handy to pour over the line while it is 
being rapidly paid out, as otherwise it is very liable to catch 
fire from friction. By this means the rabbit would arrive 
at some intelligible conception of itself, and be spared much 
of the discomfort which must now arise from doubts as to 
its personality. Nothing, indeed, is so precious to sen- 
tient things as a conviction of their own " identity " and 
their " individuality," and I need only refer those who 
have any doubt about it to the whole range of moral 
philosophy to assure themselves of this fact. If we were 
not certain who we were two days running, much of the 
pleasure of life would be lost to us. 

We entered the arid tract somewhere near the station of 
the Seven Palms. They can be seen growing far away on 
the left under the "foot-hills." About half way through 
we find ourselves at the station of Two Palms, but they are 



326 Sinners and Saints. 

in tubs. Of course there may be others, and no doubt are. 
But all you can see from the cars is a limited wilderness. 
Yet on those mountains there, on .the right — one is 12,000 
feet — there is splendid pine timber ; and on the other side of 
them, incredible as it seems, are glorious pastures, where the. 
cattle are wading knee-deep in grass ! For us, however, 
the hideous wilderness continues. The hours pass in 
a monotony of glaring sand, ugly rock fragments, and 
occasional bristly cactus. And then begins a low chapparal 
of " camel-thorn " or " muskeet," and as evening closes in 
we find ourselves at the Colorado River and at Yuma, where 
the sun shines from a cloudless sky three hundred and ten 
days in the year. 

And the weather ? I have not mentioned it as we tra- 
velled along, for I wished to emphasize it by bringing it in 
at the end of the chaper. Well, the weather. There was 
none to speak of, unless you can call a fierce dry over-heat, 
averaging 96° in the shade, weather. And this is all that 
we have had for the last twelve hours or so ; heat enough to 
blister even a lizard, or frizzle a salamander. A hot wind, 
like the " loo " of the Indian plains, blew across the des- 
perate sands, getting scorched itself as it went, and spitefully 
passing on its heat to us. It was as hot as Cawnpore in 
June ; nearly as hot as Aden. And then the change at 
Yuma ! We had suddenly stepped from Egypt in August 
into Lower Bengal in September — from a villainous dry 
heat into a far more villainous damp one. The thermometer, 
though the sun had set, was at 92°, and, added to all, was 
such a plague of mosquitoes as would have subdued even 
Pharaoh into docility. The instant — literally, the instant — 
that we stepped from our cars our necks, hands, and faces 
were attacked, and on the platform everybody, even the 
half-breed Indians loafing outside the dining-room, were 



The Yuma Mosquito, 327 

hard at work with both hands defending themselves from 
the small miscreants. The effect would have been ludicrous 
enough to any armour-plated onlooker, but it was no 
laughing matter. We were too busy slapping ourselves in 
two places at once to think of even smiling at others 
similarly engaged ; and the last I remember of detestable 
Yuma was the man who sells photographs on the platform, 
whirling his hands with experienced skill round his head and 
packing up his wares by snatches in between his whirls. 



22 8 Sinners and Saints. 



CHAPTER XXVI. 

THROUGH THE COWBOYS' COUNTRY. 

The Santa Cruz Valley — The Cactus— An ancient and honourable 
Pueblo — A terrible Beverage — Are Cicadas deaf? — A floral 
Catastrophe — The Secretary and the Peccaries. 

Yuma marks the frontier between California and Arizona. 
But it might just as well mark the frontier between India and 
Beluchistan, for it reproduces with exact fidelity a portion 
of the town of Rohri, in Sind. A broad, full-streamed river 
(the Colorado) seems to divide the town into two ; on the 
top of its steep bank stands a military post, a group of bun- 
galows, single-storied, white-walled, green-shuttered, veran- 
dahed. On the opposite side cluster low, flat-roofed houses, 
walled in with mud, while here and there a white-washed 
bungalow, with broad projecting eaves, stands in its own 
compound. Brown-skinned men with only a waistcloth 
round the loins loaf around, and in the sandy spaces that 
separate the buildings lean pariah dogs lie about, languid 
with the heat. The dreadful temperature assists to com- 
plete the delusion, and finally the mosquitoes of the 
Colorado river have all the ferocity of those that hatch on 
the banks of the Indus. 

i\.gainst our will, too, these pernicious insects board our 
train and refuse to be blown out again by all the draughts 
which we tax our ingenuity to create. So we sit up sulkily 



The Carlyle of Vegetables, 329 

in a cloud of tobacco smoke far into the night and 
Arizona — watching the wonderful cactus-plants passing our 
windows in gaunt procession, and here and there seeing 
a fire flash past us, lit probably by Papajo Indians for the 
preparation of their abominable " poolke " liquor. But the 
mosquitoes are satisfied at last, and go to sleep, and so we 
go too. 

We awake in the Santa Cruz Valley, with the prepos- 
terous cactus poles and posts standing up as stiff and straight 
as sentries "at attention," and looking as if they were doing 
it for a joke. There is no unvegetable form that they will 
not take, for they mimic the shape of gate posts, semaphores, 
bee-hives, and even mops — anything, in fact, apparently that 
falls in with their humour, and makes them look as unlike 
plants as possible. I am not sure that they ought not to be 
punished, some of them. Such botanical lawlessness is 
deplorable. But, after all, is not this America, where every 
cactus " may do as he darned pleases " ? These cacti, by 
the way — the gigantic columnar species, which throws up 
one solid shaft of flesh, fluted on each side, and studded 
closely with rosettes of spines — are the same that crowd 
in multitudinous impis on the side of the hills which slope 
from the massacre-field of Isandula in Zululand, down to 
the Buffalo River. How well I remember them ! 

If it were not for the cactus it would be a miserably un- 
interesting country, for the vegetation is only the lowest and 
poorest looking scrub, and water as yet there is none. But 
now we are approaching what the inhabitants call "the 
ancient and honourable pueblo of Tucson," pronouncing it 
Too so7t, and ancient and honourable we found it. For 
does it not dispute with Santa Fe the title of the most 
ancient town in the United States ? and was not the 
breakfast which it gave us worthy of all honour ? 



330 Sinners and Saints. 

It takes, reader, as you will have guessed, a very 
long journey indeed to knock into a traveller's head a 
complete conception of the size of North America. Mere 
space could never do it, for human nature is such that when 
trying to grasp in the mind any great lapse of time or terri- 
tory, the two ends are brought together as it were, and all 
the great middle is forgotten. Nor does mere variety of 
scene emphasize distance on the memory, for the more 
striking details here and there crowd out the large monoto- 
nous intervals. Thus a mile of an Echo canon obliterates 
half a state's length of Platte Valley pastures, and a single 
patch of Arkansas turtle-swamp whole prairies of Texan 
meadow. But in America, even though many successive 
days of unbroken travel may have run into one, or its 
many variations — from populous states to desert ones, 
from timber states to pasture ones, from corn states to 
mineral ones, from mountain to valley, river to lake, can- 
yoned hills to herd-supporting prairies, from pine forest to 
oak forest, from sodden marsh to arid cactus-land — may have 
got blurred together, there grows at the end of it all upon the 
mind a befitting sense of vastness which neither linear mea- 
surement in miles nor variety in the panorama fully explain. 
It is due, I think, to the size of the instalments in which 
America puts forward her alternations of scene. She does 
not keep shifting her suits, so as to spoil the effect of her 
really strong hand, but goes on leading each till she has 
established it, and made each equally impressive. You have 
a whole day at a time of one thing, and then you go to sleep, 
and when you wake it is just the same, and you cannot help 
saying to yourself •' Twenty-four successive hours of meadow- 
land is a considerable pasturage," and you do not forget 
it ever afterwards. The next item is twenty-four hours of 
mountains, ** all of them rich in metals ; " and by the time 



An ancient and honourable Ptiedlo, 331 

this has got indelibly fixed on the memory, Nature changes 
the sHde, and then there is rolling corn-land on the screen 
for a day and night. And so, in a series of majestic al 
ternations, the continent passes in review, and eventually 
all blends into one vast comprehensible whole. 

Apart from physical, there are curious ethnological divi- 
sions which mark off the continent into gigantic sub-nationali- 
ties. For though the whole is of course "American," there 
is always an underlying race, a subsidiary one so to speak, 
which allots the vast area into separate compartments. 
Thus on the eastern coast we have the mulatto, who gives 
place beyond Nebraska to the Indian, and he, beyond Ne- 
vada, to the Chinaman. After California comes the 
Mexican, and after him the negro, and so back to the East 
and the mulatto again. 

Here in Arizona, at Tucson, the " Mexican " is in the 
ascendant, for such is the name which this wonderful mix- 
ture of nationalities prefers to be called by. He is really a 
kind of hash, made up of all sorts of brown-skinnned 
odds and ends, an olla podrida. But he calls himself 
"Mexican," and Tucson is his ancient and honouiable 
pueblo. It is a wretched-looking place from the train, with 
its slouching hybrid men, and multitudinous pariah dogs. 
Indians go about with the possessive air of those who know 
themselves to be at home ; and it is not easy to decide 
whether they, with their naked bodies and ropes of hair 
dangling to the waist, or the half-breed Mexican with their 
villainous slouch and ragged shabbiness, are the lower race 
of the two. And the dogs ! they are legion ; having no 
homes, they are at home everywhere. I am told there is a 
public garden, and some " elegant " buildings, but as usual 
they are on "the other side of the town." All that we can 
see on this side, are collections of squalid Arabic-looking 



332 Sinners and Saints. 

huts and houses, made of mud, low-roofed and stockaded 
with ragged-looking fences. The heat is of course prodi- 
gious for eight months of the year, and the dust and the 
flies and the mosquitoes are each and all as Asiatic as the 
heat — or any other feature of this ancient and honourable 
pueblo. It has its interest, however, as an American 
" antiquity ; " while the river, the Santa Cruz, which flows 
past the town, is one of those Arethusa streams, which 
comes to the surface a few miles above the town and 
disappears again a few miles below it. 

For the student of hybrid life, Tucson must have excep- 
tional attractions ; but for the ordinary traveller, it has 
positively none. Kawai Indians have not many points 
very different from Papajo Indians, and mud hovels are 
after all only mud hovels. But it is an ancient and honour- 
able pueblo. 

The only people who look cool are the Mexican 
soldiers in blue and white, and that other Mexican, a 
civilian, in a broad-brimmed, flimsy hat, spangled with a 
tinsel braid and fringe. Have these men ever got any- 
thing to do ? and when they have, do they ever do it ? It 
seems impossible they could undertake any work more 
arduous than lolling against a post, and smoking a yellow- 
papered cigarette. Yet only a few days ago these Mexicans, 
perhaps those very soldiers there, destroyed a tribe of 
Apaches, and then arrested a force of Arizona Rangers who 
had pursued the Indians on to Mexican ground ! These 
Apaches had kept the State in a perpetual terror for a long 
time, but finding the Federal soldiers closing in upon them, 
they crossed the frontier line close to Tucson, and there fell 
in with the Mexicans, who must at any rate be given the 
credit for promptitude and efficiency in all their Indian 
conflicts. The Apaches were destroyed, and the force of 



A terrible Beverage. 333 

Rangers who had followed them were caught by the Mexi- 
can general, and under an old agreement between the two 
Republics, they were made prisoners of war, -disarmed, and 
told to find their way back two hundred and fifty miles into 
the States as best and as quickly as they could. Some thirty 
years ago a Mexican general, who captured some American 
filibusters in a similar way at the village of Cavorca, paraded 
his captives and shot them all down. So the Arizona men 
were glad enough to get away. 

The cactus country continues, and the plants play the 
mountebank more audaciously than ever. There is no 
absurdity they will not commit, even to pretending that they 
are broken fishing rods, or bundles of riding whips. But 
the majority stand about in blunt, kerb-stone fashion, as if 
they thought they were marking out streets and squares for 
the cotton-tail rabbits that live amongst them. Under the 
hill on the left is the old mission church of " San'avere " 
(San Xavier) ; and over those mountains, the " Whetstones," 
lies the mining settlement of Tombstone, where the cowboys 
rejoice to run their race, and the value of life seldom rises to 
par in the market. Then we enter upon a plain of the 
mezcal all in full bloom, and a "lodge" of brown men, partly 
Indian, partly Mexican, waiting it may be for the plant to 
mature and the time to come round for distilling its fiery 
liquor. I tasted mezcal at El Paso for the first time in 
my life, and I think I may venture to say the last, so whether 
it was good of its kind or not, I cannot tell. I am no judge 
of mezcal. But I know that it was thick, of a dull sherry 
colour, with a nasty vegetable smell, and infinitely more 
fiery than anything I ever tasted before, not excepting 
the whisky which the natives in parts of Central India 
brew from rye, the brandy which the Boers of the Trans- 
vaal distil from rotten potatoes, or the " tarantula juice " 



334 Sinnei^s and Saints. 



which you are often offered by the hearty miners of 
Colorado. It is ahiiost Hterally ''fire-water;" but the 
red pepper, I suppose, has as much to do with the effect 
upon the tongue and palate as the juice of the mezcal. 

On a sudden, in the midst of this desolate iand, we come 
upon a ranche with cattle wading about among the rich 
blue grass; but in a minute it is gone, and lo ! a Chinese 
village, smothered in a tangle of shrubs all overgrown with 
creeping gourds, with the coolies lying in the shade smok- 
ing long pipes of reed. 

Have you ever smoked Chinese "tobacco"? If not, be 
careful how you do. A single pipe of it (and Chinese pipes 
hold very little) will upset even an old smoker. For myself, 
I can hardly believe it is tobacco, for in the hand it feels of 
a silky texture, utterly unlike any tobacco I ever saw, while 
the smell of it, and the taste on the tongue, are as different 
to the buena yerba as possible. It is imported by the 
Chinese in America for their own consumption, and in spite 
of duties is exceedingly cheap. A single sniff of it, by the 
way, completely explains that heavy, stupefying odour which 
hangs about Chinese quarters and Chinese persons. 

But this glimpse of China has disappeared as rapidly 
as the ranche had done, and in a few minutes later a col- 
lection of low mud-walled huts, overshadowed by rank 
vegetation, an ox or two trying to chew the cud in the 
shade, an uptilted cart, some brown-skinned children play- 
ing with magnolia blossoms, and lo ! a glimpse of Bengal. 

And then as suddenly we are out again on to the cactus 
plains with cotton-tail rabbits everywhere, and cicadas 
innumerable shrilling from the muskeet trees. Above all the 
noise of the train we could hear the incessant chorus filling 
the hot out-of-doors, and, stepping on to the rear platform, I 
found that several had flown or been blown on to the car. 



Are Cicadas deaf? '^'t^^ 



Poor helpless creatures, with their foolish big-eyed heads and 
little brown bodies wrapped up in a pair of large transparent 
wings. But fancy living in such a hideous din as these 
cicadas live in ! Do naturalists know whether they are 
deaf? One would suppose of course that the voice was 
given them originally for calling to each other in the desolate 
wastes in which they are sometimes found scattered about. 
But in the lapse ofcountless generations that have spent their 
lives crowded together in one bush, sitting often actually 
elbow to elbow and screaming to each other at the tops of 
their voices, it is hardly less rational to suppose that kindly 
Nature has encouraged them to develop a comfortable deaf- 
ness. At any rate it is impossible to suppose that even a 
cicada can enjoy the ear-splitting clamour in which its 
neighbours indulge, and which now keeps up with us all the 
way as we traverse the San Pedro Valley, and mounting 
from plateau to plateau — some of them fine grass land, others 
arid cactus beds — reach another '•' Great Divide," and then 
descend across an immense, desolate prairie, brightened 
here and there with beautiful patches of flowers, into the 
San Simon Valley. And all the time we eat our dinner (at 
the Bowie station) the cicadas go on shrilling, on the hot 
and dusty ground, till the air is fairly thrilling, with the waves 
of barren sound. That sounds like rhyme, — and I do not 
wonder at it, — for even the cicadas themselves manage to 
drift into a kind of metre in their arid aimless clamour, and 
the high noon, as we sit on our cars again, looking out on 
the pink-flowered cactus and the mezcal with its shafts of 
white blossoms, seems to throb with a regular pulsation of 
strident sound. 

What a desolate land it seems, this New Mexico into 
which we have crossed ! But not for long. We soon 
find ourselves out upon a vast plain of grassland, upon 



336 Sinners and Saints, 

which the sullen^ egotistical cactus will not grow. " You 
common vegetables may grow there if you like," it says. 
" Any fool of a plant can grow where there is good soil ; 
but it shows genius to grow on no soil at all." So it 
will not stir a step on to the grass-land, but stands there 
out on the barren sun-smitten sand, throwing up its columns 
of juicy green flesh and bursting out all over into flowers 
of vivid splendour, just to show perhaps that '^ Todgers's 
can do it when it likes." There is about the cactus' con- 
duct something of the superciliousness of the camel, which 
wades through hay with its nose up in the air as if it 
scorned the gross provender of vulgar herds, and then 
nibbles its huge stomach full of the tiny tufts of leaves which 
is found growing among the topmost thorns of the scanty 
mimosa. 

Here, on this plain, is plenty of the " camel thorn," the 
muskeet, and a whole wilderness of Spanish bayonet wait- 
ing till some one thinks it worth while to turn it into paper, 
and there is not probably a finer fibre in the world. Nor, be- 
cause the cactus contemns the easy levels, do other flowers 
refuse to grow. They are here in exquisite profusion, a 
foretaste of the Texan " flower-prairies," and when the train 
stopped for water I got out and from a yard of ground 
gathered a dozen varieties. Nearly all of them were old 
familiar friends of English gardens, and some were beauti- 
fully scented, notably one with a delicate thyme perfume, 
and another that had all the fragrance of lemon verbena. 

Both to north and south are mountains very rich in 
mineral wealth, and at Lordsburg, where we halted, I could 
not resist the temptation of buying some ^' specimens." I 
had often resisted the same temptation before, but here 
somehow the beauty of the fragments was irresistible. Out- 
side the station, by the way, under a heap of rubbish, were 



A floral Catastrophe. 337 

lying a score or so of bars of copper bullion, worth, per- 
haps, twenty pounds apiece. Such bulky plunder probably 
suits nobody in a climate of everlasting heat, but it is all 
pure copper nevertheless — pennies en bloc. 

The plain continues in a monotony of low muskeet scrub, 
broken here and there by flowering mezcal. It is utterly 
waterless, and, except for one fortnight's rain which it re- 
ceives, gets no water all the year round. Yet beautiful 
flowers are in blossom even now, and what it must be just 
after the rain has fallen it is difficult to imagine. To 
this great flower-grown chapparal succeeds a natural 
curiosity of a very striking kind — a vast cemetery of dead 
yuccas. It looks as if some terrific epidemic had swept in 
a wave of scorching death over the immense savannah of 
stately plants. Not one has escaped. And there they 
stand, thousand by thousand, mile after mile, each yucca 
in its place, but brown and dead. And so through the 
graveyards of the dead things into Deming — Deming of 
evil repute, and ill-favoured enough to justify such a re- 
putation. Even the cowboy fresh from Tombstone used to 
call Deming " a hard place." and there is a dreadful legend 
that once upon a time, that is to say, about ten years ago, 
every man in the den had been a murderer ! No one 
would go there except those who were conscious that their 
lives were already forfeited to the law, and who preferred 
the excitement of death in a saloon fight to the dull forma- 
lities of hanging. However, tempoj-a Jiiutantur^ and all that 
I remember Deming for myself is its appearance of dejection 
and a very tolerable supper. 

And then away again, across the same flower-grown mea- 
dow, with its sprinkling of muskeet bushes, and its platoons 
of yucca, but now all radiant in their bridal bravery of waxen 
white. The death-line of the beautiful plant seems to have 

z 



338 Sinners and Saints, 



been mysteriously drawn at Deming. I got out at a stop- 
page and cut two more of the yuccas. The temptation to 
possess such splendour of blossom was too great to resist. 
But alas ! as before, the dainty thing in its virginal white was 
hideous with clinging parasites, and so I fastened them into 
the brake-wheel on the platform, and sitting in my car 
smoking, could look out at the great mass of silver bells 
that thus completely filled the doorway, and in the falling 
twilight they grew quite ghostly, the spectres of dead flowers, 
and touching them we find the flowers all clammy and cold. 
" How it chills one ! " said a girl, holding a thick, white, damp 
petal between her fingers. " It feels like a dead thing." / 
And sitting out in the moonlight— an exquisite change after 
the hateful heat of the day thfit was past — we saw the muskeet 
growth gradually dwindle away, and then great lengths of 
wind-swept sand-dunes supervened. And every now and 
then a monstrous owl — the " great grey owl of California," 
I think it must have been — tumbled up off the ground and 
into the sky above us. Otherwise the desolation was utter. 
But I sat on smoking into the night, and was abundantly 
repaid after awhile, for the country, as if weary of its mono- 
tony, suddenly swells up into billows and sinks into huge 
troughs, a land-Atlantic that beats upon the rocks of the 
Colorado range to right and left ; and as we cut our way 
through the crests of its waves, the land broke away from 
before us into bay-like recesses, crowned with galleries of 
pinnacled rock and curved round into great amphitheatres 
of cliff. But away on the left it seemed heaving with a 
more prodigious swell, and ever)- now and then down in the 
hollows I thought I could catch glimpses of moon-lit 
water glittering. And the train sped on, winding in and 
out of the upper ridges of the valley brim, and then, de- 
scending, plunged into a dense growth of willows, and lo ! 



The Secretaiy and the Peccaries, 339 

the Rio Grande, and " the shining levels of the mere." It was 
it then, this splendid stream, that had been disturbing the 
land so, thrusting the valley this way and that, shaping the 
hills to its pleasure, and that now rolled its flood along the 
stately water-way which it had made, with groves of trees 
for reed beds and a mountain range for banks ! 

We cross it soon, seeing the Santa Fe line pass under- 
neath us with the river flowing underneath it again — and then 
with the Rio Grande gradually curving away from us, we 
reach El Paso. And it is well perhaps for El Paso, that 
we see it under the gracious witchery of moonlight, for it is 
a place to flee from. Without one of the merits of Asia, it 
has all Asia's plagues of heat and insects and dust. And 
no one plants trees or sows crops ; and so, sun-smitten, and 
waterless, it lies there blistering, with all its population of 
half-breeds and pariah dogs, a place, as I said, to flee from. 
And yet on the other side of the river, a rifle-shot off, is the 
Mexican town of El Paso — for the river here separates 
the States from their neighbour Republic — and there, there 
are shade trees and pleasant houses, well-ordered streets, and 
all the adjuncts of a superior civilization. 

A brawl alongside the station platform, with a horrible 
admixture of polyglot oaths and the flash of knives, is the 
only incident of El Paso life we travellers had experience 
of. But it may be characteristic. 

One of the party who had been incidentally concerned in 
the disagreement travelled with us. He knew both New and 
Old Mexico well, and among other things which he told me 
I remember that he said that he had seen peccaries in New 
Mexico, on the borders of Arizona. I had thought till 
then that this very disagreeable member of the pig family 
confined itself to more southern regions. 

Treed by pigs is not exactly the position in which we should 
z 2 



340 Sinners and. Saints. 

expect to find a Colonial Secretary — at least, not often. But 
when one of the Secretaries in Honduras was recently exploring 
the interior of the country, he was overtaken by a drove of 
peccaries, and had only time to take a snap shot at the first 
of them and scramble up a tree, dropping his rifle in the per- 
formance, before the whole pack were round his perch, 
■gnashing their teeth at him, grunting, and sharpening their 
tusks against his tree. Now the peccary is not only fero- 
cious but patient, and rather than let a meal escape it, it 
will wait about for days, so that the Secretary had only two 
courses — either to remain where he was till he dropped 
down among the swine from sheer exhaustion and hunger, 
or else to commit suicide at once by coming down to be 
killed there and then. While he was in this dilemma, 
however, what should come along— and looking out 
for supper too — but a jaguar. Never was beast of prey 
so opportune ! For the jaguar has a particular fondness 
for wild pork, and the peccaries know it, for no sooner 
did they see the great ruddy head thrust out through the 
bushes than they bolted helter-skelter, forgetting, in their 
anxiety to save their own bacon, the meal they were them- 
selves leaving up the tree. The jaguar was off after the 
swine with admirable promptitude, and the Secretary, finding 
the coast clear, came down — reflecting, as he walked to- 
wards the camp, upon the admirable arrangements of Nature, 
who, having made peccaries to eat Colonial Secretaries, 
provided also jaguars to eat the peccaries. 

And so to sleep, and sleeping, over the boundary into 
Texas. 



341 



CHAPTER XXVII. 

American negiecc of natural history — Prairie-dogs again ; their courtesy 
and colouring — Their indifference to science — A hard crowd — 
Chuckers out — Makeshift Colorado. 

"Have we struck another city?" I asked on awaking, and 
finding the train at a standstill. 

" No, sir," said the conductor, " only a water-tank." 
" You see," I explained, " there are so many ' cities ' 
on the B-ailway Companies' maps that one hardly dares 
to turn one's head fi-om the window, lest one should let slip 
a few — so I thought it best to ask." 

No, it didn't look like a country of many cities. It was 
Texas. And the grazing land stretched on either side of us 
to the horizon, without even a cow to break the dead level 
of the surface. It was patched, however, with wildflowers. 
Yellow verbena and purple grew in acres together. And 
then the breakfasting station suddenly overtook us. It was 
called Coya, and we ate refuse. When we complained, the 
man and his wife — knock-kneed folk — deplored almost with 
tears their distance from any food supply, and vowed they 
had done their best. And while they vowed, we starved on 
damaged tomatoes ; and on paying the man I gave him advice 
to go and buy some potter's field with the proceeds, and to 
act accordingly. 



342 Sinners and Saints, 



What I hate about being starved is, that you can't smoke 
afterwards. The best part of a good meal is the pipe after- 
wards, and the more ample the meal the better the subsequent 
weed. But on a pint of bad tomatoes no man can smoke 
with comfort to his stomach. But I ate bananas till I 
thought I had qualified for tobacco, and with my pipe came 
more kindly thoughts. Outside the cars the country was 
doing all it could to soothe me, for the meadows were fairly 
ablaze with flowers. They were in distracting profusion 
and of beautiful kinds. I knew most of them as garden 
and hothouse flowers in England, but not their names; 
the verbenas, however^ were unmistakable, and so was the 
"painted daisy." It suffices, however, that the country 
seemed a wild garden as far as the eye could reach, 
yellow and orange being as usual the prevailing 
colours. 

This determination of wild flowers to these colours is a 
point worth the notice of science. And why are" the very 
great majority of Spring flowers yellow ? 

One of my companions called this distraction of colour 
a " weed-prairie," which reminds me to say that it is per- 
fectly amazing how indifferent the present generation of 
Western Americans are to the natural history of their 
country. They cannot easily mistake a crow or a rose. But 
all other birds, except "snipe" and "prairie chickens," 
seem to be divided into " robins," and " sparrows ; " and 
all flowers, except the sunflower and the violet, into lilies 
and primroses. They have not had time yet, they say, to 
notice the weeds and bugs that are about. But, in the 
meantime, a most appalling confusion of nomenclature is 
taking root. As with eatables and other things, the emi- 
grants to the States have taken with them from Europe 
the names of the most familiar flowers and birds, and any- 



Cities of Prairie-dogs, 343 

thing that takes their fancy is at once christened with their 
names. 

As the sun rose the population of these painted mea- 
dows came abroad, multitudes of rabbits, a few " chapparal 
hens," and myriads — literally myriads — of brilliant butter- 
flies. 

And so on for a hundred miles. And then Texas gets a 
little tired of so much level land and begins to undulate. 
Dry river-beds are passed, and then a muskeet ''chapparal" 
commences, and with it a prodigious city of prairie-dogs. 
But the inhabitants are partially civilized. The train does 
not alarm them in the least. It does not even arouse their 
curiosity. They sit a few feet off the rails, with their backs 
to the passing trains. Perhaps they may look over their 
shoulders at it. But they do not interrupt their gambols 
nor their work for such a trifle as a train. They eat and 
squabble and flirt — do anything, in fact, but run away. 
Now and then, as if out of good taste and not to appear too 
affected, they make a show of moving a little out of the 
way. But the motive is so transparent that the trivial 
change of position counts for nothing. The jack-rabbit 
imitates the prairie-dog, just as the Indian imitates the 
white man, and pretends that it too does not care about 
the train. But there is an expression on its ears that 
betrays its nervousness; and why, too, does it always 
manage to get under the shady side of the nearest bush ? 

One thing more about the prairie-dog, and I have 
done with him. The soil east of Colorado city changes 
for a while in colour, being reddish. Before this it had 
been sandy. And the prairie-dog alters its colour to 
suit its soil. You might say of course that the dust round 
its burrows tinged its fur, just as dust will tinge any- 
thing it settles on. But it is a fact that the fur itself is 



344 Sinners and Saints 

redder where the soil is redder, and that in the two tracts 
the little animal assimilates itself to the ground it sits 
upon. And the advantage is obvious. Dozens of prairie- 
dogs sitting motionless on the soil harmonized so exactly 
with their surroundings that for a time I did not observe 
them. Detecting one I soon learned to detect all. Now 
one of the grey prairie dogs on the red soil would have 
been very conspicuous, just as conspicuous in fact as a red 
one would have been trying to pass unobserved on the 
lighter soil. 

The undulations now increase into valleys, and splendid 
they are, with their rich crops of wild hay and abundant 
life. The train stops at a "station" (I am not sure that it 
has earned a name yet), and some cowboys, and dreadful of 
their kind, get on to the train. But it is only for an hour or 
so. But during that hour the prairie-dogs had much excite- 
ment given them by the perpetual discharging of revolvers 
into the middle of their family parties. It is impossible to 
say whether any of them were hit, for the prairie-dog 
tumbles into his hole with equal rapidity, whether he is alive 
or dead. But I hope they escaped. For I have a great 
tenderness for all the small ministers of Nature, in fur and 
in feathers. 

*• Their task in silence perfecting, 

Still working, blaming still our vain turmoil, 
Labours that shall not fail, when man is gone. " 

And yet I would be reluctant to say that their indifference 
to express trains should be encouraged. I don't like to 
see prairie-dogs thus regardless of the latest triumphs of 
science. And so if the cowboys' revolvers frightened 
them a little, let it pass. 

The train stopped again at another " station," and our cow- 



" A hard Crowd. 



345 



boy passengers got out, being greeted by two evil-look- 
ing vagabonds lying in the shade of a shrub. The meeting 
of these worthies looked unmistakably like that of thieves 
re-assembling after some criminal expedition. All alike 
seemed eager to converse, but they evidently had to wait 
till the train was gone. One man had a bundle which he 
held very tight (so it seemed to us ) between his legs. A 
few muttered sentences were exchanged, the speakers turn- 
ing their heads away from the train while they talked, and 
the rest assuming a most ludicrous affectation of indifference 
to what was being said. We started off, and looking out at 
them from the rear platform of the car, I saw they were 
already in full talk. Their animated gestures were almost 
as significant as words. Had I referred to the conductor 
I might have saved myself all conjecture. For mentioning 
my suspicions to him, he said, " Oh, yes ! Those Rangers 
who got off at Coya are after that crowd : and they're a hard 
crowd too." 

They were, without doubt, a terribly " hard crowd " to 
look at, these cowboy-men. In England they would pro- 
bably have followed " chucking out " as a profession. I re- 
member in a police court, during election time, seeing some 
hulking victims of the police charged with " rioting." But 
they pleaded, in justification of turbulence, that they were 
" chuckers out of meetings ! " They had been captured when 
expelling the supporters of a rival candidate from a pubHc 
hall with the fag ends of furniture, and made no attempt at 
concealment of their misdemeanour. They were paid, they 
said, to chuck out, and chucked out accordingly, to the best 
of their intelligence and ability, and when overpowered by the 
police attempted no subterfuge. Their stock-in-trade were 
broad shoulders and prodigious muscle. For any odd job 
of fancy work they would perhaps provide themselves with a 



346 Sinners and Saints, 

few old eggs or put a dead cat or two into their pockets. 
But, as a rule, when they went out to business they took only 
their fists and their hob-nailed boots with them, relying 
upon the meeting room to provide them with table legs and 
chairs. As soon as the signal for the disturbance was given, 
the chuckers-out "went for" the furniture, and, armed with 
a convenient fragment, looked about for people whom they 
ought to chuck. There were plenty to choose from, for a 
meeting consists, as a rule, of several or more persons, and 
the chuckers-out having marked down a knot of the enemy, 
would proceed to eject them, individually if refractory, in a 
body if docile, and would thus, if unopposed by police, 
gradually empty the room. There is something very 
humorous in this method of invalidating an obnoxious 
orator's arguments, for nothing weakens the force of a 
speech so much as the total absence of the audience. 
Nevertheless, the chucker-out sees no humour in his job. 
It is all serious business to him, and so he goes through his 
chucking with uncompromising severity. Now and then, 
perhaps, he expels the wrong man, or visits the political 
offences of an enemy upon the innocent head of one of 
his own party ; but in political discussions with the legs 
of tables and brickbats, such mistakes can hardly help 
occurring. 

And the beautiful undulating meadows continue, sprinkled 
over with shrub-like trees, and populous with rabbits and 
prairie-dogs and chapparal hens. Here and there we come 
upon small companies of cattle and horses, most contented 
with their pastures ; but what an utter desolation this vast 
tract seems to be ! The " stations " are, as yet, mere single 
houses, and we hardly see a human being in an hour. 
And then comes Colorado, a queer makeshift-looking town, 



The Train guarded, 347 

with apparently only one permanent place of habitation in 
it— the jail. 

Beyond the town we passed some Mexicans supposed to 
be working, but apparently passing time by pelting stones 
at the snakes in the water, and soon after stopped to take 
up some Texan Rangers for the protection of our train 
during the night. These Rangers reminded me very much 
of a Boer patrol, and there is no doubt that both cowboys 
and Indians find them far too efficient for comfort. 
They are, as a rule, good shots, and all are of course good 
riders. The pay is good, and, "for a spell'" as one of them 
said, the work was "well enough." And as the evening 
closed in, and we began to enter a country of dark jungle- 
looking land, the scene seemed as appropriate as possible 
for a Texan adventure. But nothing more exciting than 
cicadas disturbed our sleep. Somebody said they were 
*' katydids," but they were not — they were much katydider. 



348 Sinners and Saints, 



CHAPTER XXVIII. 

Nature's holiday — Through wonderful country — Brown negroes a libel 
on mankind— The wild-flower state — The black problem — A pie- 
bald flirt— The hippopotamus and the flea— A narrow escape— The 
home of the swamp-gobblin — Is the moon a fraud ? 

In the morning everything had changed. Vegetation was 
tropical. Black men had supplanted brown. Occasional 
tracts of rich meadow, with splendid cattle and large- 
framed horses wading about among the pasture, alternated 
with brakes of luxuriant foliage concealing the streams 
that flowed through them, while fields of cotton in lusty 
leaf, gigantic maize, and league after league of corn stubble, 
showed how fertile the negro found his land. And the 
wild flowers— but what can I say more about them? They 
seemed even more beautiful than before. 

There is something very striking and suggestive in these 
impressive efforts of Nature to command, at recurring 
intervals, a recurring homage. Thus, for one interval of the 
year the rhododendron holds an undivided empire over the 
densely-wooded slopes of the great Himalayan mountains 
in India. All the other beauties of mountain and valley 
are forgotten for that interval of lovely despotism, and every 
one who can, goes up to see '' the rhododendrons in bloom." 
Nature is very fond of such " tours de force," thinking, it 
may be, that men who see her every-day marvels and grow 



Through wonderful Country. 349 

accustomed to them require now and then some extra^ 
ordinary display, Uke the special festivals of the ancient 
Church, to evoke periodically an extraordinary homage. 
Lest the migration of creatures should cease to be a thing 
of wonder to us, Nature organizes once in a way a monster 
excursion, sometimes of rats, sometimes of deer, but most 
frequently of birds, to remind man of the marvellous in- 
stinct that draws the animal world from place to place or 
from zone to zone. For the same reason, perchance, she 
ever and again drives butter-flies in clouds from off the 
land out on to the open sea, and, that the perpetual miracle 
of Spring may not pall upon us, she gives the world in 
succession such breadths and tones of colour that even the 
callous stop to admire the sudden gold of the meadows, the 
hawthorn lying like snowdrifts along the country, the bridal 
attire of the chestnuts, or the blue levels of wild hyacinth. 
As the priestess of a prodigious cult. Nature decrees at 
regular intervals, for the delight and discipline of humanity, 
a pubUc festa, or universal holiday, to which the whole 
world may go free, and wonder at the profusion of her 
beauties. 

The track was, in places, very poor indeed, the cars 
jumping so much as to make travelling detestable and 
travellers "sea-sick." And then Dallas, with an execrable 
breakfast, and away again into the wonderful country, with 
cattle perpetually wandering on to the track and refusing to 
hear the warning shriek of the engine. The country was 
richly timbered with oak and willow and walnut, with park- 
like tracts intervening of undulating grassland. Here the 
stock wandered about in herds as they chose, and except 
for a chance tent, or a shanty knocked together with old 
packing-cases and canvas, there was no sign of human 
population. But in the timbered country every clearing had 



3 50 Sinners and Saints, 

the commencement of a settlement, the tumble-down 
rickety habitation with which the African, if left to his 
own inclinations, is content. And wonderfully picturesque 
they looked, too, these efforts at colonization in the middle 
of the forests, with the creepers swinging branches of scarlet 
blossoms from the trees, and the foliage of the plantains, 
maize and sugar-cane brightening the sombre forest depths. 
But the heat must be prodigious, and so must the mos- 
quitoes. 

It was Sunday, and after their kind the children of Ham 
were taking " rest." Parties of negresses all dressed in the 
whitest of white, with bright-coloured handkerchiefs on theii 
heads, or hats trimmed with gaudy ribands and flowers, 
and sometimes wearing, believe me, gloves, were pro- 
menading in the jungle with their hulking, insolent- 
mannered beaux. They looked like gorillas masquerading. 
In • his native country I sincerely like the negro. But 
here in America I regret to find him unlovely. I am 
told that individual negroes have done wonders. I kiiow 
they have. But this does not alter my prejudice. I think 
the brownish American negro of to-day is the most de- 
plorable libel on the human race that I have ever encoun- 
tered. And I cannot help fearing that America has a 
serious problem growing into existence in the South. The 
brown-black population is there formulating for itself, apart 
from white supervision, ideas of self-government, morality, 
" independence," and even religion, that may make any 
future intervention of a better class a difficult matter, or 
may eventuate in the contemporary growth of two sharply- 
defined castes of society. I find the opinion universally 
entertained in America that the brownish-black man is not 
3. sound or creditable basis for a communit)^, and now that 
I have seen in what numbers and what prosperity he has 



The wild-flower State. 351 

established himself in the South, I cannot but think that he 
may be found in the future an awkward factor in the body 
politic and social. 

The country in fact appears to be breeding helots as fast 
as it can for the perplexity of the next generation. 

To the north of us as we travelled was a large Indian 
reservation, and at more than one station I saw them 
crouching about the building. But I should not have 
mentioned them had it not been that I saw a white man 
trying to buy a cradle from a squaw. He offered $20 
for it, but she would not even turn her head to look at the 
money. It is quite possible that the mother thought he was 
bargaining for the papoose as well as the cradle. But I was 
assured that these women sometimes expend an incredible 
amount of labour and indeed (for Indians) of money also 
upon their papoose-panniers. One case was vouched for 
of an offer of $120 being refused, the Indians stating that 
there were $80 worth of beads upon the work of art, and 
that it had taken eleven years to complete. 

How beautiful Texas is ! And what a future it has ! For 
half a day and a night we have been traversing grazing-land, 
and for half a day fine timber growing in a soil of intense 
fertility. And now for half a day we are in a pine country, 
sometimes with wide levels of turf spreading out among the 
trees, sometimes with oak and walnut so thickly inter- 
mingled with the pines that the whole forms a magnificent 
forest. Passion-flowers entangle all the lower undergrowth, 
and up the dead trees climbs that fine scarlet creeper 
which is such an ornament of well-ordered gardens of some 
English country houses. But here in Texas the people, as 
usual, have not had time yet to think of adornments, and 
their ugly shanties therefore remain bare and wooden. 
They are of course only ugly in themselves, that is to 



352 Sinners and Saints. 

say, in material, shape, and condition, for their surroundings 
are dehghtful and location perfect. There is of course 
a good deal of " the poetry of malaria," as I heard a charm- 
ing lady say, about some of these sites. For it is impossible 
to avoid the suspicion of agues and fevers in those splendid 
clearings, with the rich foliage mobbing each patch of 
cotton, grapes, or maize. 

Whenever we happen to slacken pace near one of them 
an interesting glimpse of local life is caught. Negroidal 
women come to the doors or suddenly stand up in the 
middle of the crops in which, working, they were unper- 
ceived. From the undergrowth, the ditches, and from 
behind fences, appear dusky children, numbers of them, a 
swart infantry that seems to me to fill the future with 
perplexity. Are these swarms going to grow up a credit 
to the country ? Have they it in their breed to be fit com- 
panions in progress of the progeny of the best European 
stocks ? 

The abundance of wild life, too, is very noticeable. 
Wherever we stop we become aware of countless butterflies 
and insects busy among the foliage, and the voices of 
strange birds resound from the forest depths. 

But other sites appear to me perfection. Take Marshall 
for instance, or Jefferson. Which is the more beautiful of 
the two ? Some of the " commercial " settlements, just 
beginning life with a railway-station, six drug stores, and 
seven saloons, have situations that ought to have been re- 
served for honeymoon Edens. They are " hard " places. 
Law as yet there is none except revolver law, and that is 
pitiless and sudden and wicked. For Texas, the beautiful 
flower state, blessed with turf and blessed with pines, has 
still the stern commencements of American life before it — 
that rapid, fierce process of civilization which begins 



A memorable Negress, 353 

with cards and whisky and murder, which finds its first 
protection in the *' Vigilantes " who hold their grim tri- 
bunals under the roadside trees, but which suddenly one 
day wrenches itself, as it were, from its bad, lawless past, 
and takes its first firm step on the high road to order and 
prosperity and the world's respect. For every intelligent 
traveller these ragged, half-savage, settlements should have 
a great significance and interest. Before he dies they may 
be Chicagos or San Franciscos. And these men, with 
their mouths full of oaths and revolvers on their hips, 
are the fathers of those future cities. They will have no im- 
mortality though in the gratitude of posterity. For they will 
shoot each other off in those saloons, or the Rangers will 
shoot them down on the flower prairies beyond the forests. 
But they will have done their work nevertheless. Nature in 
every part of her scheme proceeds on the same system of 
building foundations upon ruins. Whole nations have to 
be killed off when they have prepared and preserved the 
ground as it were for those that are to follow. Whether 
they are nations of men, or of beasts, or of plants, she uses 
them in exacdy the same way. Everything must subserve 
the ultimate end. 

But I did not intend to moralize. The negress waiter at 
Longview (where we dine very badly) reminds me how 
practical life should be. She never stops to moraHze. On 
the contrary, she just stands by the window, swallowing all 
the peaches and fragments of pudding that the travellers 
leave on their plates. Two he negroes wait upon us. But 
it looks as if they were there to feed the negress rather than 
to feed us. For they keep rushing in with full dishes to us 
and rushing off with the half empty ones to her. And there 
she stands omnivorous, insatiable, black. Everything that 
is brought to her of a sweet kind she swallows. Not as if 

A a 



354 Sinners and Saints, 

she enjoyed it, but as if she must. It was like throwing 
things into a sink. She never filled up. 

And then, through the splendid tropical country, to Mar- 
shall. I must return to Marshall, Texas, some day and be 
disillusioned, or else I shall go down to my grave accusing my- 
self of having passed Paradise in the train, and not " stopped 
off" there. What an exasperating reflection for a death- 
bed ! I should never forgive myself. But perhaps it is 
not so beautiful as it seems. In any case studies " from 
the life " would be immensely interesting. I caught a few 
glimpses which entertained me prodigiously. There was the 
negro dandy walking painfully in patent-leather boots that 
were made for some man with ordinary feet, with a fan in his 
hand and a large flower in his button-hole, an old stove-pipe 
hat on his head, and a very corpulent handleless umbrella 
under his arm. There was another, similarly caparisoned, 
escorting three belles for a walk in the neighbouring jungle, 
the ladies all wearing white cloth gloves and black cloth 
boots that squelched out spaciously as they put their feet 
down. And alas ! there was the black coquette, with her 
bunch of crimson flowers behind her ear, her black satin 
skirt and white muslin jacket, her parasol of black satin 
lined with crimson — and how she flirts up the green 
slope, with a half-acre smile on her face ! She looks back 
at every other step to see which, if any, of the black men, or 
the brown, or the yellow, on the station platform is going 
to follow her expansive charms, and so she disappears, this 
piebald siren, into the groves, her parasol flashing back 
Parthian gleams of crimson as she goes. But every one, 
man, woman, or child, black, brown, or yellow, was a study, 
so I must go back to Marshall some day. 

At present, however, we are whirling away again through 
the lovely woodland, and the whole afternoon passes in an 



The fat Negro and small Mtclatto, 355 



unbroken panorama of forest views, with great glades of 
meadow breaking away to right and left, and patches of 
maize and cotton suddenly interrupting the stately proces- 
sion of timber. And then Jefferson. Is Jefferson more 
prettily situated than Marshall? I cannot say. But 
Jefferson lies back among the trees with an interval of 
orchard and corn-land between it and the railway line, and 
looks a very charming retreat indeed. A fat negro comes 
on board on duty of some kind connected with the brake, 
and a witty little half-breed boy comes on after him. The 
fat negro is the brown boy's butt. And he nearly bursts 
with wrath at the hybrid urchin's chaff, and threatens, between 
gasps, a retaliation that cannot find utterance in words. 
But the brown boy is relentless, and though the train is 
rapidly increasing in its speed, he clings to the step and 
taunts the negro who dare not leave his look-out post. But 
he knows very well where the fat man will get off, and 
suddenly, with a parting personality, the little wretch drops 
off the step, just as a ripe apple might drop off a branch. 
And then the fat man has to get off. The speed is really 
dangerous, but he climbs down the steps backwards, think- 
ing apparently only of his tormentor, and still breathing 
forth fire and slaughter ; and then lets go. Is he killed ? 
Not a bit of it. He lands on his feet without apparently 
even jarring his obese person, and when we look back, we 
see that he is already throwing stones at the small boy, 
whose batteries are replying briskly. I wonder if the 
hippopotamus ever caught the flea ? And if he did, what 
he did to him ? 

And I remember how the Somali boys in Aden used to 

drive the bo'sun to the verge of despair by clambering on 

to the ship and pretending not to see him working his 

way round towards them with a rope's end behind his back, 

A a 2 



356 Sinners and Saints. 

and how at the very last moment, almost as the arm was 
raised to strike, the young monkeys used to drop off back- 
wards into the sea, like snails off a wall. 

But is this Bengal or Texas that we are travelling 
through ? The vegetation about us is almost that of sub- 
urban Calcutta, and the heat, the damp steamy heat of low- 
lying land, might be the Soonderbuns. And here befell an 
adventure. We were nearing Atalanta. The train was on 
a down grade and going very fast indeed, perhaps half a 
mile a minute. I was sitting on my seat in the Pullman 
with the table up in front of me and reading. At the other 
end of the car was a lady with some children sitting with 
their backs to me. Further off, but also with his back to 
me, was the conductor. Each " section " of a car has two 
windows. The one at my left elbow had the blind drawn 
down. The other had not. On a sudden at my ear, as it 
seemed, there was a report as of a rifle ; the thick double glass 
of the window in front of me flew into fragments all over me, 
and the woodwork fell in splinters upon my book. I instantly 
pulled up the blind of the other window and looked out to 
see who had " fired." But of course at the speed we were 
going, there was no one in sight. I called out to the con- 
ductor that some one had fired through the window. He 
had not heard the explosion, nor had the lady. So their 
surprise was considerable. And while I was looking in the 
woodwork for the bullet I expected to find, the conductor 
picked ^off my table a railway spike ! Some wretch had 
thrown it at the passing train, and the great velocity at which 
we were travelling gave the missile all the deadly force of a 
bullet. "An inch more towards the centre of the win- 
dow, sir, and you might have been killed," said the brake- 
man. A look at the splintered woodwork, and the bullet-like 
groove which the sharp-pointed abomination had cut for 



The Home of the Swamp-goblin, 357 

itself, was sufficient to assure me that he was right. 
But think of the atrocious character of such mischief. The 
man who did it probably never thought of hurting any one. 
And yet he narrowly missed having a horrible crime on his 
head. " If we could have stopped the train and caught him, 
we would have lynched him," said the conductor. " A year 
or two ago a miscreant threw a corn cob into a window, 
very near this spot too. It struck a lady, breaking her 
cheek bone, and bursting the ball of her left eye. We 
stopped the train, caught the man, and hanged him by the 
side of the track then and there." 

And then Atalanta, in a country that is very beautiful, 
but with that poetry of malaria which suggests a peril 
in such beauty. And gradually the land becomes swampy, 
and the old trees, hung with moss, stand ankle-deep in 
brown stagnant water. The glades are all pools, and where- 
ever a vista opens, there is a long bayou stretching down 
between aisles of sombre trees. It is wonderful in its 
unnatural beauty, this forest standing in a lagoon. The 
world was like this when the Deluge was subsiding. There 
is a mysterious silence about the gloomy trees. Not a bird 
lives among them. But in the sullen water, there are tur- 
tles moving, and now and then a snake makes a moment's 
ripple on the dull pools. Sunlight never strikes in, and as 
I looked, I could not help remembering all the horrors of 
the slave-hunt, and the murder at the end of it, in the dark 
depths of some such horrid brake as these we pass. What 
a spot for legends to gather round ! Has no one ever 
invented the swa7np-gobli?i ? 

For an hour and more we pass through this eerie country, 
and then comes a change to higher land with a splendid 
growth of pine and walnut and oak all healthily rooted in 
dry ground. But towards evening we come again into the 



35^ Sinners mid Saints, 

swamps, and the sun goes down rosy-red behind the water- 
logged trees, till their trunks stand out black against the 
ruddy sky and the pools about their feet take strange 
tints of copper and purpled bronze. And suddenly we 
flash across the track of the narrow-gauge line to New 
Orleans — and such a sight ! The line pierces an avenue, 
straight as an arrow, for miles and miles through the belt of 
forest. On either side along the track lie ditches filled 
with water. But to-night the ditches seem filled with 
logwood dye, and the wonderful vista through the deep 
green trees is closed as with a curtain, by the crimson 
west ! 

It was only a glimpse we got of it, but as long as 
I live I shall never forget it, the most marvellous sight of 
all my life. 

No, not even sunrise upon the Himalayas, nor the moon- 
light on the palm-garden in Mauritius — two miracles 
of simple lovelmess that are beyond words — could sur- 
pass that glimpse through the Texan forest. It was not 
in the least like this earth. Beyond that crimson curtain 
might have been heaven, or there might have been hell. 
But I am not content to believe that it was merely 
Louisiana. , 

And now comes Texakharna with its sweltering Zanzibar 
heat, but an admirable supper to put us into good humour, 
and a beautiful moonlight to sit and smoke in. If the 
sunset was weird, the moonlight was positively goblinish. 
Such gloom ! Not darkness remember, but gloom, blacker 
than darkness, and yet never absolutely impenetrable. At 
least so it seemed, and the fire-flies, flickering in thousands 
above the undergrowth and up among the invisible branches, 
helped the fancy. And the frogs ! Was there ever, even 
in India in " the rains," such a prodigious chorus of batra- 



Katydids, 359 



chians ? And the katydids ! Surely they were all gone 
mad together. But it was a delightful ride. Sometimes 
in the clearings we caught glimpses of negro parties, the 
white dresses of the women glancing in and out along 
the paths, and the sound of singing coming from the huts 
in the corners of the maize-patches. 

Here at the corner of a clearing stands a cottage, a 
regular fairy-tale cottage " by the wood," and in the moon- 
light it looked as if, " really and truly," the walls were made 
of toffy and the roof was plum-cake. At any rate there 
were great pumpkins on the roof, just such pumpkins as 
those in which Cinderella (after they had turned into 
coaches) drove to the Prince's ball. And I would bet my 
last dollar on it that the lizards that turned into horses were 
there too, and the rats, and in the marsh close by you 
might have a large choice of frogs to change into coachmen. 

And yet, I cannot help thinking, there is a good deal of 
false sentiment expended upon the moon, the result of a 
demoralizing humility which science has taught the inhabi- 
tants of "the planet we call Earth." We are for ever being 
warned by our teachers against the sin of pride, and being 
told that the universe is full of " Earths " just as good as 
ours, and perhaps better. We are not, they say, to fancy 
that our own world is something very special, for it is only 
a httle ball, spinning round and round in the firmament, 
among a number of other balls which are so superior to it 
that if our own insignificant orange came in contact 
with them we should get the worst of the collision. Nor 
are we to fancy that the moon is our private property, and 
grumble at her shabbiness, as our planetary betters have a 
superior claim to their share of her, and this sphere of ours 
ought to be very thankful for as much of the luminary as it 
gets. 



360 Sinners and Saints, 

Now, to my thinking, there is something distinctly 
degrading in this view. EngHshmen maintain patriotically 
that Great Britain is the Queen of the Sea ; why, then, 
should not we Earthians, with a larger patriotism, say that 
our planet is the best planet of the kind in the firmament, 
and, putting on one side all petty territorial distinctions, 
boldly challenge the supremacy of the Universe itself? 
Depend upon it, if any presumptuous moon-men or Jupi- 
terites were to descend to Earth and begin to boast, they 
would be very soon put down, and I do not see, therefore, 
why we should not at once call upon all the other stars and 
comets to salute our flag whenever we sail past them on the 
high seas of the Empyrean. As it is, we are taught 
timidity by science, and told that whenever a filibustering 
comet or meteor — the pirates and privateers of the skies — 
comes along our way we are to expect instant combustion, 
or something worse. Why are they not made to drop their 
colours by a shot across their bows ? or why, when we next 
see a meteor bearing down upon us, should we not steer 
straight at it, and, using Chimborazo or Mount Everest, or the 
dome of St. Paul's, or the Capitol at Washington as a ram, 
sink the rascal ? A broadside from our volcanic batteries, 
Etna and Hecla, Vesuvius, Erebus, and the rest would 
soon settle the matter, and we should probably hear no 
more for a long time to come of these black-flagged craft 
who go cruising about to the annoyance of honest planets. 
The same unbecoming apprehensions are entertained with 
regard to the moon. Yet it is absurd that we should be 
afraid of her. The Earth, by its velocity and weight, could 
butt the moon into space or smash her into all her original 
fragments, could bombard her with volcanoes, or put an 
earthquake under her and make a ruin of her, or turn the 
Atlantic on to her and put her out. The moon is really 



Is the Moon a fraud? 361 

our own property, something between a pump and a 
night light, and, if the truth must be told, not very good as 
either. Twice a day she is supposed to raise the water of 
our oceans, but we have often had to complain of her irre- 
gularity; and every night she ought to be available for 
lighting people home to their beds, but seldom is. As a rule, 
our nights are very dark indeed, owing to her non-attendance ; 
and even when she is on duty the arrangements she makes 
for keeping clouds off her face are most defective. If the 
Earth were to be half as irregular in the duties which she has 
to perform there would soon be a stoppage of everything, 
collisions at all the junctions, accidents at the level cross- 
ings, planets telescoped in every direction, and passengers 
and satellites much shaken, if not seriously injured. But 
the Earth is business-like and practical, and sets an example 
to those other denizens of the firmament which are perpetually 
breaking out in eruptions, getting off the track, and going 
about in disorderly gangs to the public annoyance. Why, 
then, we ask, ought our planet to be for ever taking off its 
hat to the flat-faced old moon, who is always trying to show 
off with borrowed light, makes such a monstrous secret 
of her "other side," is perpetually being snubbed by 
eclipses, and made fun of by stars that go and get 
occultated by her ? 

But there are objections to discarding the luminary, for 
it is never a graceful act to turn off an old dependant, and, 
besides, the moon is about as economical a contrivance as 
we could have for keeping up the normal average of lunatics, 
giving dogs something to bark at by night when they cannot 
see anything else, and affording us an opportunity of showing 
that respect for antiquities which is so becoming. 

But what business the Man in the Moon has there, 
remains to be decided ; and who gave him permission to go 



362 Simters and Saints. 

collecting firewood in our moon, remains to be seen. 
For it is well to remember that a very distinguished French 
savant has proved that the moon is the private property of 
the Earth. We used, he says, to do very well without a moon 
once upon a time ; but going along on our orbit one day, we 
picked up the present luminary — then a mere vagabond, a 
disreputable vagrant mass of matter, with no visible means 
of subsistence — " and shall, perhaps, in the future pick up 
other moons in the same way." As a matter of fact then, he 
declares the moon to be a dependant of our Earth, and says 
that if we were selfishly to withdraw our " attraction " from 
it, the poor old luminary would tumble into space, and 
never be able to stop herself, or, worse still, might come into 
collision with some wandering comet or other, and get 
blown up entirely. We ought, therefore, to think kindly of 
the faithful old creature ; but we should not, all the same, 
allow any length of service to blind us to the actual relations 
between her and ourselves — much less to make us frightened 
of the moon. 

But the man in the moon should be seen to. He is 
either there or he is not. If he is, he ought to pay taxes : 
and if he is not, he has no right to go on pretending that 
he is. 



3^3 



CHAPTER XXIX. 

Frogs, in the swamp, and as a side-dish — Negroids of the swamp age — , 
Something like a mouth — Honour in your own country — The Land 
of Promise — Civilization again. 

Arkansas remains on the mind (and the traveller's note- 
book) as a vast forest of fine timber standing in swamps. 
There are no doubt exceptions, but they do not suffice 
to affect the general impression. And if I owned Arkansas 
I think I should rent it to some one else to live in ; espe- 
cially to some one fond of frogs. For myself, I feel no ten- 
derness towards the monotonous batrachian. Even in a bill 
of fare the tenderness is all on the frog's side. But on 
the whole, I like him best when he is cooked. In the 
water with his " damnable iteration " of Yank ! yank ! yank ! 
I detest him — legs and all. But served " a cresson," with a 
clear brown gravy, I find no aggressiveness in him. It 
gets cooked out of him : he becomes the gentlest eating 
possible. Butter would not melt in his mouth, though it 
does on his legs. There is none of the vaHant mouse- 
impaling "mud-compeller " about him when you foregather 
with him as a side dish. Aristophanes would not recognize 
him, and the " nibbler of cheese rind " might then triumph 
easily over him. Yet to think how once he shuddered the 
earth, and shook Olympus ! The goddess that leans upon a 
spear wept for him, and Aphrodite among her roses trembled. 



364 Sinners and Saints. 

But here in Arkansas, on a hot night in "the Moon of Straw- 
berries," what a multitudinous horror they are these " tuneful 
natives of the reedy lake ! " Like the laughter of the sea, 
beyond arithmetic. Like the complainings of the plagued 
usurers in Hell, beyond compassion. I cannot venture my 
pen upon it. It is like launching out upon " the tenth 
wave," for an infinite natation upon cycles of floods. It is 
endless ; snakes with tails in their mouths ; trying to correct 
the grammar of a Mexican's English. 

But, seriously ; was ever air so full of sound as these 
Arkansas swamps " upon a night in June ! " It fairly 
vibrates with Yank ! yank ! yank ! And yet over, and under, 
and through, all this metallic din, there shrills supreme the 
voice of strident cicadas, without number and without shame, 
and countless katydids that scream out their confidences 
to all the stars. It is really astonishing ; a tour de force 
in Nature; a noisy miracle. I wonder Moses did not think 
of it, for such a plague might have done him credit, I think. 
At all events, the ancestors of Arabi Pasha would have been 
egregiously inconvenienced by such a hubbub. It is no use 
trying to talk ; yank — Katy did — yank — yank. That is all 
you hear. So you may just as well sit and smoke quietly, 
and watch the moon-lit swamps and wonderful dark forests 
go by, with their perpetual flicker of restless fire-flies, twink- 
ling in and out among the brushwood. If they would only 
combine into one central electric light ! . All the world 
would go to see them — the new " Brush-light." But there 
is very little sense of utility among fire-flies. They flicker 
about for their own amusement, and are of a frivolous, 
flighty kind ; perpetually striking matches as if to look for 
something, and then blowing them out again. They strike 
only on their own box. 

But here comes a station — " Hope." We are soon past 



Negroids of the Swamp Age. 365' 

Hope ; and then comes another swamp, with its pools, that 
have festered all day long in the sun, emitting the odours of, 
a Zanzibar bazaar, and standing in the middle of them ap- 
parently are some clearings already filled with crops, and a 
hut or two cowering, as if they were wild beasts, just on the 
edge of the timber where the shadows fall the darkest. What 
kind of people are they that live in this terraqueous land ? 
No race that is fit to rule can do it. No, nor even fit to 
vote. Some day, no doubt, the wise men of the world will 
dig up tufts of wool, and skulls with prognathous jaws, and 
label them " Negroids of the swamp age." Or they may 
fall into the error of supposing that the wool grew all over 
their bodies equally, and some Owen of the future discourse 
wisely of " the great extinct anthropoids of Arkansas." For 
in those wonderful days that are coming— when men will 
know all about the wind-currents, and steer through ocean- 
billows by chart, when doctors will understand the small- 
pox, and everybody have the same language, currency, reli- 
gion, and customs duties, and when every newspaper oflice will 
be fitted with patent reflectors, showing on a table in the 
editor's room all that is going on all over the world, and 
special correspondents will be as extinct as dodos, and when 
many other delightful means of saving time and trouble 
will have come to pass — then, no doubt, as the Mormons 
say, all the world will have become " a white and a delight- 
some people," and the commentators will explain away the 
passages in the ancient English which seem to point to the 
early existence of a race that was as black as coals, and 
lived on pumpkins in a swamp. 

And still we sit up, long past midnight, for never again 
in our lives probably shall we have such an experience as 
this, so unearthly in its surroundings — forests thar crowded 
in upon the rails and hung threateningly over the cars, 



366 Sinners and Saints. 

pools that lay glistening in the moonlight round the 
foot of the trees, the air as thick as porridge with the 
yanking of brazen throated frogs, and the screaming of tin- 
lunged cicadas, yet all the time alive with lantern-tailed 
insects — ^just as if the clamour of frogs and cicadas struck 
fireflies out of each other in the same way that flint and 
steel strike flashes, or as if their recriminations caught fire 
like Acestes' arrows as they flew, and peopled the in- 
flammable air with phosphorescent tips of flame — a battery 
of din perpetually grinding out showers of electric sparks. 

And to make us remember this night the cars bumped 
abominably over the dislocated sleepers and the sunken 
rails, as the Spanish father whipped his son that he might 
never forget the day on which he saw a live salamander ; 
and the engine flew a streamer of sparks and ink-black 
smoke, till it felt as if we were riding to Hades on a three- 
legged dragon. But it came to sleep at last, and we went 
to bed, leaving the moonlit country to the vagaries of the 
fireflies and the infinite exultations of the frogs. 

Awaking in the morning with " the grey wolfs tail " still 
in the sky, what a wonderful change had settled on the 
scene ! The same swamped forests on either side of us : the 
same gloomy trees and the same sulky-looking pools ; but 
a dull leaden Silence supreme ! Where were the creatures 
that had crowded the moonlight ? You might live a whole 
month of mornings without suspecting that there were any 
such things in Arkansas as frogs or katydids or fireflies ! 

I should have gone to sleep again if I had not caught 
sight of our new porter, or brakeman. He happened to be 
kughing, and the corners of his mouth, so it seemed to me, 
must have met behind. I need hardly say he was a negro. 
But at first I thought he was a practical joke. I took the 
earliest opportunity of looking at the back of his neck, to 



Through fiooded Forests. 367 



see what kept his head together when he laughed. But I 
only saw a brass button. I should not have thought that 
was enough to keep a man's skull together, if 1 had not 
seen it. And he was always laughing, so that there was 
nearly as much expression on the back of his head as on 
the front. He laughed all round. 

I felt inclined to advise him to get his mouth mended, 
or to tell him about " a stitch in time." But he seemed 
so happy I did not think it worth while. 

Is it worth while saying that the swamp forest continued ? 
I think not. So please understand it, and think of the 
country as a flooded forest, with wonderful brown waterways 
stretching through the trees, just as glades of grass do else- 
where, with here and there, every now and again, a broad 
river-like bayou of coffee stretching to right and left, and 
winding out of sight round the trees, and every now 
and again a group of wooden cabins, most picturesquely 
squalid, and inhabited by coloured folk. 

Does anybody know anything of these people? Are 
they cannibals, or polygamous, or polyandrous, or am- 
phibious ? Surely a decade of unrestricted freedom and 
abundant food in such solitudes as these, must have deve- 
loped some extraordinary social features ? At all events, it 
is very difficult to believe that they are ordinary mortals. 

The hamlets are few and far between, and it is only 
once or twice during the day that we strike a village 
nomine digitus. Looking at a garden in one of these 
larger hamlets, I notice that the hollyhock and pink 
and petunia are favourite flowers; and it is worth re- 
marking that it is with flowers as with everything 
else— the imported articles are held in highest esteem. 
Writing once upon tobacco cultivation in the East, I 
remember noting that each province between Persia and 



368 Sinners and Saints, 

Bengal imported its tobacco from its next neighbour on the 
west, and exported its own eastward. It struck me as a 
curious illustration of the universal fancy for " foreign " 
goods. So with flowers. It is very seldom that the wild 
plants of a locality arrive at the dignity of a garden. In 
England we sow larkspurs ; in Utah they weed them out. 
In England we prize the passion-flower and the verbena; 
in Arkansas they carefully leave them outside their garden 
fences. And what splendid flowers these people scorn, 
simply because they grow wild ! Some day, I expect, it 
will occur to some enterprising settler that there is a 
market abroad for his " weeds " ; and that lily-bulbs and 
creeper-roots are not such rubbish as others think. 

Then Poplar Bluff, a crazy-looking place, with many of 
its houses built on piles, and a saloon that calls itself " the 
XI0U8 saloon." I tried to pronounce the name. Perhaps 
some one else can do it. Then the swamp reasserts itself, 
and the forest of oak and walnut, sycamore and plane. But 
the settlements are singularly devoid of trees, whether for 
fruit or shade. The people, I suppose, think there are too 
many about already. 

And now we are in Missouri — the Mormons' * land 01 
promise,' and the scene of their greatest persecutions. It is 
a beautiful State, as Nature made it ; but it almost de- 
serves to be Jesse-Jamesed for ever for its barbarities to- 
wards the Mormons. No wonder the Saints cherish a 
hatred against the people, and look forward to the 
day when they shall come back and repossess their land. 
For it is an article of absolute belief among the Mormons, 
that some day or other they are going back to Jackson 
County, and numbers of them still preserve the title-deeds 
to the lands from which they were driven with such mur- 
derous cruelty. 



Back to the Mississippi. 369 

It was here that I saw men working a deposit of that 
'' white earth " which has done as much to bring American 
trade-enterprise into disrepute as ghicose and oleomarge- 
rine put together. In itself a harmless, useless substance, 
it is used in immense quantities for '' weighting " other 
articles and for general adulteration ; and I could not help 
thinking that the man who owns the deposit must feel 
uncomfortably mean at times. But it is a paying concern, 
for the world is full of rascals ready to buy the stuff. 

And, after all, one half the world lives by poisoning the 
other. 

A thunderstorm broke over the country as we were pass- 
ing through it, and I could not help admiring the sincerity 
of the Missouri rain. There was no reservation whatever 
about it, for it came down with a determined ferocity that 
made one think the clouds had a spite against the earth. 
Moss Ferry, a ragged, desolate hamlet, looked as if it was 
being drowned for its sins : and I sympathized with pretty 
Piedmont in the deluge that threatened to wash it away. 
But we soon ran out of the storm, and rattling past 
Gadshill, the scene of one of Jesse James' train-robbing 
exploits, and sped along through lovely scenery of 
infinite variety, and almost unbroken cultivation, to Arcadia. 

But this is "civilization." In a few hours more I find 
myself back again at the Mississippi, the Indus of the 
West, and speeding along its bank with the Columbia 
bottom-lands lying rich and low on the other side of the 
prodigious river, and reminding me exactly of the great 
flat islands that you see lying in the Hooghly as you steam 
up to Calcutta— past the new parks which St. Louis is 
building for itself, and so, through the hideous adjuncts of 
a prosperous manufacturing town, into St. Louis itself. 

Out of deference to St. Louis, I hide my Texan hat, and 

B b 



3 /O Sinners and Saints, 

disguise myself as a respectable traveller. For I have done 
now with the wilds and the West, and am conscious in 
the midst of this thriving city that I have returned to a 
tyrannical civilization. 

And I take a parting cocktail with the Western friend 
who has been my companion for the last three thousand 
miles. 

" Wheat," says he, with his little finger in the air. 

And I reply, ^' Here's How." 



L. 

^ 



THE END. 



UNDER THE SUN. 

BY PHIL. ROBINSON. 

i6mo, cloth. Price, $1-50. 
ROBERTS BROTHERS, Publishers, Boston. 



OPINIONS OF THE LONDON PRESS ON THE WRITINGS OF 
THE "NEW ENGLISH HUMORIST." 



" Th#se delightful papers . . . quaint humor and remarkable literary skill and 
taste. Old Izaac Walton would have enjoyed them immensely ; so would White 
of Selborne, and even Addison would have admired them. ... A sympathetic 
power of entering into their life and hitting it off in a happy and humorous man- 
ner, with the aid of much literary culture. ... In reading his loving diatribes 
against his furred and feathered acquaintances, one cannot help remembering that 
India has always been the home of the Beast Story. But since the Sanskrit Hito 
padesa was put together, we question whether any writer has given us such pic- 
tures of the floating population of lotus-covered tanks, and the domestic life that 
goes on in the great Indian trees. To Mr. Robinson, every pipal or mango^ tree 
is a many-storied house : each branch is full of vitality and intrigue, as an eta^e 
of a Parisian mansion. Snakes and toads live in a small way on the ground floor, 
until the arrival of the mongoose with his writ of ejectment; lizards lead a rackety, 
bachelor existence in the entresol ; prosperous parrots occupy smiQS en pfT7iiiere ; 
cats and gray squirrels are for ever skipping up or down stairs. The higher stories 
are the modest abodes of the small artistic world ; vocalist bulbuls and dramatic 
mainas rehearsing their parts. The garrets and topmost perches are peopled with 
poor predatory kites or vultures ; from whom the light-fingered and more deeply 
criminal crow pilfers, not without a chuckle, their clumsily stolen supper. . . . 
Mr. Robinson is the Columbus of the banyan-tree. He sails away into its recesses 
and discovers new worlds. . . . Mr. Robinson has only to do justice to his artistic 
perceptions, and to his fine vein of humor in order to create for himself a unique 
place among the essayists of our day." — The Academy. 

" These charming little word-pictures of Indian life and Indian scenery are, 
so it appears to us, something more than an unusually bright page in Anglo-Indian 
literature ... as much humor as human sympathy. . . . The book abounds in 
delightful passages ; let the reader, who will trust us, find them for himself . . . 
Mr. Edwin Arnold, who has introduced this little volume to English readers by a 
highly-appreciative preface, says truly that from these slight sketches a most vivid 
impression of every-day Indian life' may be gathered. . . . The chief merit of 
tliese Indian sketches lies in their truthfulness; their realism is the secret of their 
vivid poetic life." — The Exaviuier. 

" One of the most charming little series of sketches we have ever read. If we 
could imagine a kind of cross between White of Selborne and the American 
writer Thoreau, we should be able better to define what manner of author Mr. 
Phil Robinson is. He is clearly a masterly observer of out-door life in India, and 
not only records faithfully what he sees, but illuminates the record by flashes of 
gentle culture such as can only come from a well-stored and scholarly mind, and 
darts, moreover, sunny rays of humor such as can only proceed from a richly en- 
dowed and truly sympathetic nature. All living things he loves, and hence he 
writes about them reverently and lovingly What the accomplished author of the 
preface calls ' the light and laughing science ' of this little book will do mure to 
familiarize the English reader with the out-door look of India than anything else, — 
save, of course, years of residence in the country."— The Daily Telegraph. 



Press Notices. 



" One of the most delightful and fascinating h'ttle books with which we have 
met for a long time. It is a rare pleasure to come across anything so fresh and 
brilliant. ... A literary treat is presented in this most clever and striking little 
volume. We can fancy with what a thorough sense of enjoyment poor Mortimer 
Collins would have turned over these pages, and how Mr. Robinson's graphic 
sketches of the ways of birds and the growth of trees would have appealed to 
Charles Kingsley. It is certainly a striking illustration of the old story, ' Eyes 
and No Eyes.' His style is particularly happy, and there is a freshness of tone 
about his whole book which raises it far above the ordinary level. ... It has 
been reserved for Mr. Robinson to open this new field of literature to English 
readers ; and we hope that his venture may meet with the success which it de- 
serves, so that the present volume may prove but the first of a long and delightful 
series. . . ." — Johii Bzdl. 

"This is a charming volume. ... In his style we are reminded frequently of 
Charles Lamb. . . . The book has an antique flavor, like the quaint style of Elia; 
and, like Lamb, Mr. Robinson has evidently made an affectionate acquaintance 
with some of our early humorists. That he is himself a humorist, and looks at 
Indian life with a mirthfulness sometimes closely allied to pathos, is the charac- 
teristic which is likely first to strike the reader. But he will observe, too, that if 
Mr. Robinson describes birds, flowers, trees, and insects with the pen of the 
humorist rather than of the naturalist, it is not because he has failed to note the 
common objects in his Indian garden with the patient observation of a man of 
science. The attraction of a book like this will be more easily felt than described; 
and, just as there are persons unable to enjoy the fragrance of certain flowers or 
the taste of certain choice wines, it is possible Mr. Robinson's brightly-written 
pages may not prove universally attractive. Readers who enjoy them at all will 
enjoy them thoroughly. ... It would be impossible to convey the full flavor of 
this distinctly marked volume without extracting freely from its pages. The 
sketches are so full of freshness and vivacity that the reader., sitting under an 
English roof, will be able for the moment to see what the writer saw, and to feel 
what he felt." — The Fall Mall Gazette. 

"This book is simply charming. ... A perfect mine of entertaining and 
unique information. ... An exquisite literary style, supplementing rare po\yers 
of observation; moreover, the resources of a cultivated intellect are brought into 
play as well as those of a delicate and fertile fancy- The distlngtiishing character- 
istic of these charming trifles is perhaps leisureliness, yet something of the quaint 
grace of our olden writers clings to Mr. Robinson's periods. . . . Mr. Robinson, 
in short, is one of those few authors who have found their precise metier^ and can 
therefore write so as to entrance his readers." — The IVhitehall Review. 

"A delightful little book is ' My Indian Garden,' in which an Anglo-Indian 
sketches, with a delicacy, grace, and humor that are unflagging and irresistible, 
some aspects of outdoor life in India which have hitherto, for the most part, 
escaped the observation of writers on that wonderful land. ... As an observ^er 
of natural history, he is scarcely inferior to Gilbert White, while he has a capacity 
for recognizing and bringing out the ludicrous aspect of a subject that was denied 
to the dear old recluse of Selborne, and the literary charm of the book will be 
apparent to all. Mr. Robinson quaintly mingles shrewd observation of the man- 
ners and customs of the creatures he portrays with quizzical and metaphysical 
speculation. It has been said that Mark Twain's ' New Pilgrim's Progress,' 
with all its drollery, is about the best and most informatory tourist's handbook 
for the Holy Land in existence. Just in the same way Mr. Robinson's ' Noah's 
Ark' is the best possible companion for a visitor to the London Zool<\gical Gar- 
dens. Our author has an unerring eye for the ludicrous aspect of things ; he 
pokes fun remorselessly at all animated nature, from the elejjhant to the mosquito ; 
but aiTiid the play of his humor there are many touches of real pathos, snatches 
of powerful description, and a great deal of soUd information. . . ." — Edinburgh. 
Scotsman. 

" It is not given to many writers in these days to produce a book, small or 
large, which shall not in some degree remind the omnivorous reader of many other 
books, either by reason of its subject-matter, or its mode of treatment, or of both. 
Mr. Robinson's 'In my Indian Garden,' however, fairly establishes for its author 
a claim to this rare distiuctiou. A faocy open to all the quaint, humorous, old phil- 



Press Notices. 



osophical reflections which the objects around him sugg^est. Underlying this in- 
direct way of looking at things, a genuine love of Indian rural life, and a cultivated 
taste, are abundantly indicated. Some of the brief descriptive passages are curiously 
vivid." — Daily News. 

" Mr Robinson is a genial naturalist and genuine humorist. A more agreeable 
pocket-companion we can hardly choose than \.\\\s\o\\xme:.'' — Ilhairaied London 
News. 

" Mr. Robinson's charming essays breathe the true literary spirit in every line. 
They are not mere machine-made sweetmeats, to be swallowed whole and never 
again remembered ; but they rather resemble the most cunning admixtures of 
good things, turned out by a skilful craftsman in matters culinary. Whoever once 
reads this delicious little book will not lay it carelessly aside, but will place ir with 
respectful epicurean tenderness on his favorite shelf, side by side with Oliver 
Wendell Holmes's 'Kindred Musings,' and not far removed from the fresh coun- 
try atmosphere of Gilbert White's ' Selborne.' Mr. Robinson plants himself in 
the verandah ot a bungalow, it is true, and surveys nature as it presents itself upon 
the sweltering banks ot the Jumna; but he sees it with an eye trained on the 
shores of Cam or Isis, and describes it with a hand evidently skilled in the com- 
position of classical lore. Mr. Robinson's humor is too tender not to have a 
pathetic side ; little children come in for no small share of pitiful, kindly notice, 
and the love for dumb creatures shines out in every page." — Z(7«^£'«. 

" Mr. Edwin Arnold's praise is valuable, for it is the praise of one who knows; 
and Mr. Robinson fully deserves all that is said of him. His style is delightful. 
He has read much and observed much; and there is a racy flavor of Charles 
Lamb about him. A book which once begun is sure to be read through, and then 
read aloud to any to whom the reader wishes to give pleasure." — The Echo. 

" Bright and fanciful — the author has done for the common objects of India 
something which Gilbert White did for Selborne— graceful and animated sketches, 
sometimes full of an intense reality, in other places of a quaint and delicate humor 
which has a flavor as of the ' Essays of Elia.' " — The Giiardian. 

" This dainty volume is one of those rare books that come upon the critic from 
time to time as a surprise and a refreshment, — a book to be put in the favorite 
corner of the library, and to be taken up often again with renewed pleasure. Mr. 
Robinson's brief picturesque vignettes of every-"day life in India— always good- 
natured, often humorous — are real little idylls of exquisite taste and delicacy. 
Mr. Robinson's style is exuberant with life, overflowing too with reminiscences of 
Western literature, even the most modern. In his longer and more ambitious 
descriptions he displays rare graphic power; and his sketches of the three sea- 
sons — especially those of the rainy and hot seasons — remind one forcibly of the 
wonderful realism of Kalidasa himself." — Dublin Review. 

" The author is one of the quaintest and most charming of our modern writers 
in an almost forgotten kind. Mr. Robinson belongs to that school of pure literary 
essayists whose types are to be found in Lamb and Christopher North and Oliver 
Wendell Holmes, but who seem to have died out for the most part with the pre- 
scientific age. One or two of the pieces remind one not a little of Poe in his 
mood of pure terror with a tinge of mystery ; the story of the ' Man-Eating Tree,' 
for example, is told with all Poe's minute realism. It is good sterling light litera- 
ture of a sort that we do not often get in England." — Fall Mall Gazette. 

" ' The Hunting of the Soko' is a traveller's tale of a very exciting kind ; and 
the first of all, 'The Man-Eating Tree,' is quite a master-piece of that kind. But 
the best and also the longest contribution to the volume is the sketch of an Indian 
tour called 'Sight-Seeing.' His pictures of India are certainly very vivid." — 
S^. James's Gazette. 

"Tenderness and pathos ; delicate and humorously quaint." — Pan. 

" In ' The Hunting of the Soko' there is much cleverness in the way in which 
the human attributes of the quarry are insinuated and worked out, clouding the 
successful chase with a taint of manslaughter and uncomfortable remorse. The 
account of the ' Maa-Eating Tree,' too, a giant development of our droseras and 



Press Notices. 



dionjeas, is a very good traveller's stor>;. But the best as well as the most con- 
siderable of these essavs, occupying in fact, two-fifths of the volume, is one 
entitled ' Sight-Seeing.' ' Here we have the benefit of the author's familiarity, not 
merely with the places in India worth seeing, but with tiie customs and character of 
the people. With such a ' sight-seer ' as guide, the reader sees many things the 
ordinary traveller would miss, and much information and not a little food for 
reflection are compressed into a relatively small space in a style which is not only 
pleasant but eloquent." — The AthencEuin. 

" A deftly-mixed olla-podrida of essays, travel, and stories. 'Sight-Seeing' is 
one of those happy efforts which hit off the real points of interest in a journey. 
' My Wife's Birds' is an essay, genial and humorous; the 'Daughter of Mercy,' 
an allegory, tender and suggestive. But the tales of adventure carry off tlie palm. 
These stoi-ies are marvellous and fanciful, yet imaginative in the highest sense. 
'The Man-Eating Tree' and the ' Hunting of the Soko,' blend thrilling horror 
and weird superstition with a close imitation of popular stories of actual adven- 
ture." — Tke IVorld. 

" In a series of powerfully drawn sketches, Mr- Robinson shows that he belongs 
to the happy few in whom intimate acquaintance with Indian objects has created 
no indifference. The vignettes which he paints are by turns humorous and pathetic, 
serious and powerful, charming and artistic. From them we gain a vivid impres- 
sion of the every-day world of India. They show us in really admirable descrip- 
tions, bright and quaint, what a wealth of material for Art, Literature, and 
Descriptive Painting lies latent even in the daily experiences of an Englishman in 
India The author writes about butterflies and insects, things furred and feath- 
ered, flowers and trees, with a keen eye for the life and instincts of Indian scenery, 
and with a deli'^hiul svmpathy for the East. . . . His exquisite sketches remind 
one of the classical work— ' Wliite's Natural History of Selborne.' In Mr. 
Robinson's book there is to be found the same patience in observation united to 
the charm of a highly-cultured mind. . . . Where everything is so good it would 
be idle to show a preference by quotation." —^yja^ajiu fur bie i^lteratUr tc^ 

" Mr. Phil. Robinson has his own way of looking at Nature, and a very pleas- 
ant way it is. His love of his subject is as genuine, perhaps mire so, than that 
of the solemn naturalist who writes with a pen of lead : he can be at once lively 
and serious ; and his knowledge, which resembles in variety the contents of an 
ostrich's stomach, is exhibited without effort. Indeed, it would be incorrect to 
say that it is exhibited at all. His style is, no doubt, achieved with art, but the 
art is not seen, and his easy method of expressing what he knows may deceive the 
unwary reader. . . . This delightful volume ! A book which deserves the atten- 
tion both of old and young readers." — The Spectator. 

"When Mr. Robinson sent out those delightful chapters entitled 'In My 
Indian Garden,' it was evident that a new genius had appeared on the horizon of 
English literature. In that exquisite little booic, the original and accurate obser- 
vations of animal life which charmed the naturalist were conveyed with a humor 
so entirely new and clothed with a diction so perfect as to give a very high literary 
value to the work as well as a signal promise of further performance on a yet 
larger scale. . . . His purely literary quality reminds us of the old masters of 
humor; but it has the unique advantage of alliance with a range of exact knowl- 
edge of the animal world of which none of Mr. Robinson's predecessors can 
boast. And yet our autlior, with all his knowledge and love of animals, is pre- 
eminently a classic humorist. His rare and distinctive faculty is seen in his vyay 
of inverting our method of studying animals. In his scheme of investigating 
nature, man does not play his usually proud part of discoverer and exponent of 
his fellow animals in fur and feathers ; rather he is discovered and expounded by 
them. When the Unicorn in Mr. Lewis Carroll's Throus^h the Lookins^-glass 
first saw Alice, he remarked that he had always thought little girls were fabulous 
creatures. Mr. Robinson possesses in perfection this power of presenting man 
from what may be supposed to be an animal's point of view. And the view that 
every animal exists for itself and that all barriers to its self;interest are so many 
accidents and interferences with the scheme of nature, finds in our author's hands 
the most startling and amusing expression. . . . Mr. Robinson possesses grace, 



^^W'ji-?^'^' 



m^^^ 



:S^~-^ 



LiDHMnT ur V^UINUntOO 




017 055 935 6 # 



